Meeting Abstract
Understanding the locomotion of extinct vertebrates offers insight into their paleobiology and helps to conceptualize major transitions in vertebrate evolution. Reconstruction of a fossil’s locomotor behavior, however, remains problematic, because of the limited information preserved and lack of one-to-one correspondence between form and function. No quantitative and reproducible approaches to reconstruct locomotor characteristics of stem amniote fossils are available, and generally methods suffer from overreliance on anatomical features, ambiguous locomotor information preserved in ichnofossils, or unspecific modelling of locomotor dynamics. We attempted to reconstruct gaits of Orobates pabsti. We present an integrative methodological framework that uses constraints from quantified metrics for energetic efficiency, balance, dynamic similarity and precision of matching fossil tracks. Our framework uses in vivo assessment of locomotor mechanics in four extant species to guide an anatomically informed kinematic simulation as well as dynamic simulations and biorobotics to filter the parameter space for plausible gaits. Our approach might be useful for similar research into the locomotion of key taxa to gain insight into evolutionary transitions. Importantly, our quantitative and dynamic reconstruction can be extended and revised according to future methodological advances.
