Bringing a fossil to life: Reverse engineering locomotion

How an animal moves can tell scientists a lot about how it lives. That is how researchers hope to learn more about an ancient crocodile-like creature called Orobates pabsti. Orobates lived before the dinosaurs. It is known as a ’stem amniote’ - an early offshoot of the lineage which led to ’amniotes’, namely birds reptiles and mammals. Using 3D scans of an exquisitely preserved Orobates fossil and an associated set of fossilised footprints, researchers built a dynamic simulation. The simulation also incorpo