His specific research interests include the phylogenetics of birds, the functional morphology of aves and non-avian dinosaurs, as well as the paleoenvironments of fossil vertebrates.
[5] Dyke's research is concerned with "the evolutionary history of birds and their dinosaurian relatives" and encompasses anatomy, phylogenetics, functional morphology, paleoecology, taphonomy, sedimentology, and aerodynamics as well as the analysis and interpretation of large fossil-record datasets.
[3] In 1999, Dyke and a colleague reported that while the "traditional view, based largely on the fossil record," was that most modern birds "did not appear until the Tertiary, after the end-Cretaceous extinction event," new molecular divergence data "suggested that most, or all, of the major clades, were present in the Cretaceous.
"[6] In a 2002 article, Dyke and a colleague reported that recent data had yielded "[d]ramatic new perceptions of the life history, growth and development of early birds.
[11][12] Dyke and three colleagues reported in 2009 "that low-cost analysis of satellite image data (derived from Landsat ETM+) can be used efficiently for the 'remote prospecting' of a large field area.
[18] It was reported in January 2013 that a European/Chinese team including Dyke had discovered "a new bird-like dinosaur from the Jurassic period," which challenged "widely accepted theories on the origin of flight."
"[19] In a 2013 article for Nature, Dyke and five colleagues reported that while the "[d]iscovery of feathered theropod dinosaurs in China during the past two decades have prompted dramatic revisions of our ideas of the evolution of birds and the origins of flight — including the suggestion that the iconic fossil Archaeopteryx might have lain some distance from the ancestry of modern birds," a new fossil discovery "restores Archaeopteryx as an early diverging avialan.