Robots are bringing new life to extinct species
OroBot’s proportions are informed by CT scans of fossils. The researchers used off-the-shelf parts to assemble the automaton. The large sizes of standard actuators, devices that convert energy into motion, meant they had to scale up OroBot to about one and a half yards (1.4 meters) in length, twice the size of the original. They also equipped the bot with flexible pads for tread instead of anatomically accurate feet. Feet are complex bodily structures that are a nightmare to replicate: They have a wide range of motion and lots of connective soft tissue.
ALESSANDRO CRESPI/EPFL LAUSANNE
Thanks to the team’s creative shortcut, OroBot looks as if it’s tromping in flip-flops. But the robot’s designers took pains to get other details just so, including its 3D-printed faux bones, which were painted a ruddy color and given an osseous texture to more closely mimic the original fossil. It was a scientifically unnecessary design choice, but a labor of love. “You can tell that the engineers really liked this robot,” Nyakatura said. “They really fell in love with it.”
Once OroBot was complete, Nyakatura’s team put it on a treadmill to see how it walked. After measuring the robot’s energy consumption, its stability in motion, and the similarity of its tracks to fossilized footprints, the researchers concluded that Orobates probably sashayed like a modern caiman, the significantly punier cousin of the crocodile. “We think we found evidence for this more advanced terrestrial locomotion, some 50 million years earlier than previously expected,” Nyakatura says. “This changes our concept of how early tetrapod evolution took place.”
Robotic ammonites
Ammonites were shell-toting cephalopods—the animal class that encompasses modern squids and octopuses—that lived during the age of the dinosaurs. The only surviving ammonite lineage today is the nautilus. Fossils of ammonites, though, are abundant, which means there are plenty of good references for researchers interested in studying their shells—and building robotic models.
PETERMAN, D.J., RITTERBUSH, K.A., CIAMPAGLIO, C.N., JOHNSON, E.H., INOUE, S., MIKAMI, T., AND LINN, T.J. 2021. “BUOYANCY CONTROL IN AMMONOID CEPHALOPODS REFINED BY COMPLEX INTERNAL SHELL ARCHITECTURE.” SCIENTIFIC REPORTS 11:90
When David Peterman, an evolutionary biomechanist, was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Utah from 2020 to 2022, he wanted to study how the structures of different ammonite shells influenced the underwater movement of their owners. More simply put, he wanted to confirm “whether or not [the ammonites] were capable of swimming,” he says. From the fossils alone, it’s not apparent how these ammonites fared in aquatic environments—whether they wobbled out of control, moved sluggishly, or zipped around with ease. Peterman needed to build a robot to find out.
