Ultimately all of the many disparate and varied tendrils of scientific research can trace some form of connection to every other field, though some are more surprising than others. One of the joys of academia is finding a new application to an established method, and being able to unlock problems that had stifled previous attempts to get past them, or at least provide a new line for confirmation of existing ideas. Many of these are purely serendipitous in origin – after all, it's hard to go out and look for a new method to apply to your research when you don't know it exists.

In our case we have come together as colleagues at Queen Mary, University of London. While Dave works primarily on dinosaur behaviour and ecology, Steve is very mathematical, building models to test ideas about evolution and distributions of organisms and events. In particular, Steve has been working on a technique called Geographic profiling (GP), a statistical model originally developed to help track down serial killers.

In criminology, GP helps to identify likely candidates from large lists of suspects in cases of serial crime such as murder or rape. With large lists of suspects (for example, 268,000 names in the Yorkshire Ripper investigation in the UK in the 1980s), it is difficult or impossible to investigate each name, and a prioritisation strategy is useful. GP uses the spatial locations of crime sites to make inferences about the location of the offender's 'anchor point' (usually a home, but sometimes a workplace). The model assigns a score to each point in the search area; the higher the score, the greater the probability that the offender's anchor point is located there.

GP has been highly successful in criminology, and is used by law enforcement agencies around the world, including the FBI, Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Steve has pioneered its introduction to biology, in fields such as animal foraging (where it can be used to find animal nests or roosts using the locations of foraging sites as input), epidemiology (identifying disease sources from the addresses of infected individuals) and invasive species biology (using current locations to identify source populations). Putting two and two together, we felt there was scope to try and apply some dinosaurian data to this method. Over the last few months we've been working with two students to track down data on the localities where various tyrannosaur fossils have been found. By using these as sources, we hope add a new technique to the interpretation of their distribution and use this to produce a better understanding of their patterns and processes.

It should be stressed that the work is at an early stage. It shows some promise, but as with all real forays into the scientific unknown, we do not yet know how it is going to turn out. However, as an example of two very different bases of reach coming together, it is hopefully a good one. The title of this piece might sound like complete hyperbole, but the truth is we really are using (OK, trying to use) serial killer methodology to hunt for tyrannosaurs. With interactions between palaeontologists and aeronautical engineers or astrophysicists, this may not even be the strangest link between palaeontology and another field, but it is proof positive of the distances that can be broached.