Produced by: Tarun Mishra Designed by: Manoj Kumar
Researchers are investigating the use of robotics to recreate extinct animals, including dinosaurs and ancient marine reptiles, to study their movement and anatomical features, as reported in Science Robotics.
By replicating the physical structures and movements of extinct species like Tyrannosaurus Rex, scientists hope to gain insights into how these animals adapted and evolved in their environments.
The goal of these robotic recreations is to improve our understanding of evolution. Dr. Michael Ishida from the University of Cambridge explained that the simulations could compress millions of years of evolutionary changes into a single day’s engineering work.
The concept, known as “paleoinspired robotics,” combines bioinspired robotics with evolutionary studies, focusing on how anatomical changes across species may have influenced their biomechanics and environmental interactions over time.
Traditional bioinspired robotics focuses on replicating features of living species. In contrast, paleoinspired robotics aims to simulate anatomical changes and evolutionary pressures on extinct species across multiple historical periods.
Dr. Ishida noted that by building robotic models based on the features of ancient fish, scientists could explore evolutionary shifts that contributed to the transition from aquatic to terrestrial life.
Incorporating robotics into paleontological research enables the testing of evolutionary feasibility, allowing researchers to study if certain anatomical features in extinct animals could have supported their survival in diverse environments.
The paleo inspired robotics approach opens new avenues to study artificial evolution, offering a comparative framework to understand the evolutionary mechanics and constraints that influenced extinct species’ survival and adaptation.