David Hone

There are several broad themes to my research, though I have worked on a wide range of topics and contributed to a number of different areas of palaeontological and biological research. My work focuses on the (non-avian) dinosaurs as a whole and especially the carnivorous theropods, and also on the flying pterosaurs. However, I have also published on birds, and more basal archosaurs and archosauromorphs in the past. I often use a wide range of extant analogues in my research and thus also look at extant mammals, birds and reptiles as part of my work.

My research is aimed at answering key questions about these animals and in particular what this means for how they lived their lives in terms of their behaviour and ecology:

How did they hunt and feed?
How might they have communicated?
Was there social structure within herds?
How large did they get and what did this mean for their biology?
These questions have led to my publishing on a series of papers on the evolution of large body size, socio-sexual signalling, sexual selection, feeding traces and bite marks, stomach contents, and the evolution of anatomical adaptations linked to these issues.