A 450 - million - twelvemonth - old extinct marine organism is back not with a flush , but more of a blue thud , after research worker recreated it in the pattern of a soft automatic replication . It ’s hoped that it ’s the first of many such robots that could be used to give us a better understanding of how nonextant organisms moved , and how this acquire into what we see in the animal kingdom today .
The robot is a replication of a pleurocystid , a marine organism that belong to the echinoderms , a class of animals that today includesstarfishand sea urchins . Pleurocystids are believed to have been one of the first echinoderm capable of using a muscular stem to move and play a decisive role in echinoderm phylogenesis . However , there ’s nothing quite like them that exists today , so it ’s difficult to know exactly what their evolutionary role involved .
As a resultant , researcher turned tosoft roboticsto repair the ancient being and its movements . The outside squad used pleurocystid fogy evidence to guide the design of the golem , which they made from a combining of 3D - printed factor and polymers . This mimic the flexible nature of the animal ’s tail - corresponding muscular stem .
They discovered that the muscular stem was likely vital to the organism ’s motion , allowing it to move over theseafloorby push the beast forward – wide wholesale motility were likely to have been the most good motion for this . The researchers also feel that they could increase the brute ’s speed by increase the duration of the radical , in a path that would n’t have cost the creature too much of its energy .
The pleurocystid robot is part of a burgeoning new field of research – paleobionics . The field place to habituate robotics with flexible fabric and easy stuff to replicateextinctorganisms , in the hopes of understanding more about the biomechanical factors that drove evolution . After demonstrating that this was possible with pleurocystics , the researcher are aim to reduplicate even more extinct creatures .
“ Bringing a raw life to something that existed virtually 500 million eld ago is exciting in and of itself , but what really excites us about this breakthrough is how much we will be able to learn from it , ” said co - author ProfessorPhil LeDucin astatement . “ We are n’t just looking atfossilsin the ground , we are trying to better understand life through working with amazing paleontologists . ”
The field is published in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .
