ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Soft robotics informs how an early echinoderm moved.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 12 citations in OpenAlex.
- Frequency-selective actuation of liquid crystalline elastomer actuators with radio-frequency.Nature communications · 2025Article
- A forward-engineered, muscle-driven soft robotic swimmer.Science advances · 2025Article
- Feeding postures as indicators of mutable collagenous tissue in extinct echinoderms.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Rhombot and the dawn of paleobionics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
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Abstract
The transition from sessile suspension to active mobile detritus feeding in early echinoderms (c.a. 500 Mya) required sophisticated locomotion strategies. However, understanding locomotion adopted by extinct animals in the absence of trace fossils and modern analogues is extremely challenging. Here, we develop a biomimetic soft robot testbed with accompanying computational simulation to understand fundamental principles of locomotion in one of the most enigmatic mobile groups of early stalked echinoderms-pleurocystitids. We show that these Paleozoic echinoderms were likely able to move over the sea bottom by means of a muscular stem that pushed the animal forward (anteriorly). We also demonstrate that wide, sweeping gaits could have been the most effective for these echinoderms and that increasing stem length might have significantly increased velocity with minimal additional energy cost. The overall approach followed here, which we call "Paleobionics," is a nascent but rapidly developing research agenda in which robots are designed based on extinct organisms to generate insights in engineering and evolution.
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Registered trials
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