{"id":206248,"date":"2025-02-12T14:04:06","date_gmt":"2025-02-12T20:04:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/robots-are-bringing-new-life-to-extinct-species"},"modified":"2025-02-12T14:04:06","modified_gmt":"2025-02-12T20:04:06","slug":"robots-are-bringing-new-life-to-extinct-species","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/robots-are-bringing-new-life-to-extinct-species","title":{"rendered":"Robots are bringing new life to extinct species"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/robots-are-bringing-new-life-to-extinct-species.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Paleontologists aren\u2019t easily deterred by evolutionary dead ends or a sparse fossil record. But in the last few years, they\u2019ve developed a new trick for turning back time and studying prehistoric animals: building experimental robotic models of them. In the absence of a living specimen, scientists say, an ambling, flying, swimming, or slithering automaton is the next best thing for studying the behavior of extinct organisms. Learning more about how they moved can in turn shed light on aspects of their lives, such as their historic ranges and feeding habits.<\/p>\n<p>Digital models already do a decent job of predicting animal biomechanics, but modeling complex environments like uneven surfaces, loose terrain, and turbulent water is challenging. With a robot, scientists can simply sit back and watch its behavior in different environments. \u201cWe can look at its performance without having to think of every detail, [as] in the simulation,\u201d says John Nyakatura, an evolutionary biologist at Humboldt University in Berlin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Paleontologists aren\u2019t easily deterred by evolutionary dead ends or a sparse fossil record. But in the last few years, they\u2019ve developed a new trick for turning back time and studying prehistoric animals: building experimental robotic models of them. In the absence of a living specimen, scientists say, an ambling, flying, swimming, or slithering automaton is [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-206248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206248\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}