South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Robot recreates the walk of a 290-million-year-old creature
WASHINGTON — How did the earliest land animals move? Scientists have used an ancient fossil skeleton and preserved ancient footprints to create a moving robot model of prehistoric life.
Evolutionary biologist John Nyakatura at Humboldt University in Berlin has spent years studying a
290-million-year-old fossil dug up in central Germany’s Bromacker quarry in 2000. The four-legged plant-eater that lived before dinosaurs fascinates scientists “because of its position on the tree of life,” said Nyakatura. Researchers believe the creature is a “stem amniote” — an early land-dwelling animal that later evolved into modern mammals, birds and reptiles.
Scientists believe the first amphibious animals emerged on land 350 million years ago and the first amniotes emerged around
310 million years ago. The fossil, called Orabates
pabsti, is a “beautifully preserved and articulated skeleton,” said Nyakatura. What’s more, scientists have previously identified fossilized footprints left by the 3-foot-long creature.
Nyakatura teamed up with robotics expert Kamilo Melo at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne to develop a model of how the creature moved. Their results were published in the journal Nature recently.
The researchers built a life-size replica of the prehistoric beast and tested the motion in various ways that would lead its gait to match the ancient tracks, ruling out combinations that were not anatomically possible.
They repeated the exercise with a slightly-scaled up robot version, which they called OroBOT. The robot is made of motors connected by 3D-printed plastic and steel parts.
Scientists said they think the creature had more advanced locomotion than previously thought for such an early land animal. (Think more scampering than slithering.)
“It walked with a fairly upright posture,” said Melo. “It didn’t drag its belly or tail.”