Scientists recreated plesiosaur swimming using a bio-inspired control system, revealing coordinated flipper motion and shedding light on extinct animals’ locomotion.
SciTechDaily has a piece about how plesiosaurs swam. How did plesiosaur swim in the oceans? A new paper in the journal Scientific Reports looked into the "four-wing problem" in plesiosaur swimming.
A research team may have unlocked the mystery of how the ancient marine reptile, the plesiosaur, moved by developing a bio-inspired control system that simulates its motion adjustments.
Extinct animals have vastly different body shapes from animals still around today, making it difficult to determine how they moved by comparing them to living species. Additionally, fossils rarely preserve the soft limb tissues that scientists need to study locomotion and gain key insights into their lifestyles.
Plesiosaurs roamed Earth’s prehistoric oceans, propelled by their unique body structure, which featured four large, equally sized flippers. Yet how plesiosaurs used these flippers to swim has long baffled paleontologists. This so-called ‘four-wing problem’ has been a topic of heated debate for years.
