Scientists Plan To Recreate Extinct Creatures Like Dinosaurs As Robots

Scientists are looking into the idea of utilising robotics to recreate long-extinct animals like dinosaurs and marine reptiles, according to a report in Science Robotics. By imitating the motions and anatomical features of extinct animals like the Tyrannosaurus Rex, these devices may offer important new insights into evolution. The goal of these artificial recreations, according to researchers, is to improve our knowledge of evolution and the natural environment.

"We have these animals that evolution has created over millions and millions of years, but with a couple lines of code or a new 3D-printed leg we can simulate those millions of years of evolution in a single day of engineering effort," Dr Michael Ishida, of the University of Cambridge and a co-author of the review article, told The Guardian.

"Building a robot [based on these living species of fish] will hopefully give us a little bit of insight into what kind of evolutionary pressures, or what kind of mechanics, started to force fish to develop these different anatomies that would be useful on land," he said, adding that such learning would help the team develop paleo-inspired robots of extinct fish.

In the review article, scientists propose "paleoinspired robotics," an emerging research paradigm that combines the traditional bioinspired robotics framework with the study of evolutionary trajectories. Paleoinspired robotics markedly expands upon the conventional objectives and methodologies associated with bioinspired robotics.

As per the research article, traditionally, bioinspired robotics research focuses on replicating and understanding certain features of a single extant animal. Conversely, paleoinspired robotics seeks to investigate the consequences of anatomical changes on the kinematics, biomechanics, and energetics of multiple species in different time periods, especially as applied to overarching evolutionary trajectories. Augmenting the field of palaeontology with paleoinspired robotics enables the investigation of evolutionary feasibility of features, and the comparison between paleoinspired robotics and bioinspired robotics facilitates the study of artificial evolution.