'Resurrecting' ancient creatures into robots

Researchers hope to be able to recreate the entire bodies of ancient creatures thanks to a new field: paleontology-inspired robotics.

"We have animals that have undergone millions of years of evolution, but with just a few lines of code or a new 3D-printed leg, we can simulate millions of years of evolution in a short time , " the Guardian quoted Dr. Michael Ishida, working at the University of Cambridge (UK) and co-author of the study.

Robots inspired by ancient creatures help explore how vertebrates transitioned from water to land - (Photo: University of Cambridge)

Ishida is part of a team that studies the evolutionary ability of certain fish, such as mudskippers, to move on land. Building a robot based on these fish could help us understand what kind of evolutionary pressures or mechanisms forced fish to develop different anatomical structures that might be useful on land, he said.

The team also notes that engineers have long been able to create robots that mimic living creatures , and have also been able to build robots to explore specific features of extinct species, including plesiosaurs .

They hope to move on to reconstructing the ancient animal's entire body in the near future. "Analyzing just one leg is not enough to really understand how a four-legged animal moved ," said Ishida.

Extinct reptiles like plesiosaurs could be recreated into robots - (Photo: Alamy).

Such robots have an advantage over computer simulations because they can be tested in real-world environments, according to Dr. Ishida.

The team says the field of 'paleontology-inspired robotics' could help answer questions like how vertebrates transitioned from living in water to living on land, how flight evolved, and how some animals went from walking on four legs to walking on two. These major changes can't easily be understood by looking at fossils alone, Ishida says.

Professor Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland who was not involved in the research, said there was potential in the field of "paleontologically inspired robotics." "It would be fascinating to build a robot to understand how giant dinosaurs walked and moved ," Brusatte said.

The research was published in the journal Science Robotics .