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Luke Muscutt with the robot flippers
Luke Muscutt, a PhD student in Engineering and the Environment, lead the team which worked with partners at the University of Bristol to analyse the propulsion method of plesiosaurs –marine reptiles that lived at the same time as dinosaurs and died out more than 65 million years ago.
Plesiosaurs used two near-identical pairs of flippers to propel themselves through the water – whereas other animals, including existing species such as turtles and sea lions, have differently constructed front and back sets, using the front ones mainly for thrust and the back ones for steering.
However, the propulsion dynamics of the plesiosaur have long been debated, with various theories proposed since the 1950s.
A paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B describes a series of water tank experiments the researchers carried out using 3D printed flippers attached to a robotic mechanism to mimic a range of movement combinations.
They studied plesiosaur fossils and X-rays of existing flipper-powered animals to determine the shape of the large, wing-like flippers and the range of motions the robotic mechanism would need to reproduce.
The team found that swirling movements in the water created by the front flipper allowed for a major increase in thrust and efficiency by the back flipper.
A plesiosaur fossil
This suggests that plesiosaurs would have used all four flippers to propel themselves through the water.
Luke Muscutt, writes :
“Fossils by themselves don’t tell us much about how plesiosaurs actually moved. Short of genetically engineering a plesiosaur, our best available option was to create a robot to show how it might have happened.
“The results indicate why plesiosaurs were such a successful species, retaining four flippers for more than 100 million years.”
According to Colin Palmer, of the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences: “Our results resolve a long-standing debate about the mechanics of plesiosaurs swimming and demonstrate the effectiveness of the tandem flipper arrangement.”
