Bringing ancient species BACK TO LIFE? As ROBOTS?
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
Fossils show us what the first animals looked like. Being able to recreate them is a window into the incredible world of ancient species. What could they teach us about evolution?
Enter Carmel Majidi and team from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. They created a robot inspired by fossils of pleurocystitids. These marine organisms lived 450 MILLION years ago!
The authors used flexible electronics and soft materials to create a small, flexible robot. They used 3D-printed elements and polymers to mimic the ancient species’ flexible columnar structure.
The authors used the soft robot and computational simulations to understand pleurocystitids biomechanics. They showed how these creatures possibly moved on the sea bottom by pushing themselves forward. For this, they used a set of muscles, like worms and snakes!
Recreating ancient species will help us understand how animal movement evolved.
Coming soon: Jurassic World – Rise of the Mecha-saurs!
Reference: Desatnik, R., Patterson, Z. J., Gorzelak, P., Zamora, S., LeDuc, P., & Majidi, C. (2023). Soft robotics informs how an early echinoderm moved. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 120(46), e2306580120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2306580120