Oliver is an evolutionary biomechanist and palaeobiologist with a specialty in animal movement and locomotion. He is intrigued in how animals move and why they move the way they do. He is interested in how environmental changes and ecological pressures shaped and formed the animal skeleton through time, ultimately driving their evolution and leading to novel innovations enabling their survival or, if unable to adapt, ultimately leading to their extinction. To address these issues, he employs inter-disciplinary tools borrowed from engineering, computer science and the entertainment industry in order to understand living and fossil animal movement. He has gathered extensive knowledge on animal locomotion and joint movement through in silico simulations and the use of X-ray Reconstruction of Moving Morphology (XROMM; e.g., in vivo of crocodilians and birds and ex vivo on bird wings at the Royal Veterinary College, Liverpool John Moores University, University of Cambridge and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin). He obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge where he investigated the evolution of flight in birds using XROMM to capture the wing mobility in living birds to understand their wing movement and that of fossil birds. He then moved to Liverpool John Moores University where he undertook a postdoctoral research fellowship on dinosaur locomotory biomechanics. Currently, Oliver is investigating the timing and origin of flight on the line leading from dinosaurs to birds.