Bringing a fossil to life: Reverse engineering locomotion

You can tell a lot about an animal from the way it moves, which is why scientists have been recreating the movements of an extinct crocodile-like creature called Orobates pabsti. Orobates lived well before the time of the dinosaurs and is what’s called a ’stem amniote’ - an early offshoot of the lineage which led to birds, reptiles and mammals. Using 3D scans of an exquisitely preserved Orobates fossil - and an associated set of fossilised footprints - researchers were able to build a dynamic computer simul