Victoria AdolphusA groundbreaking discovery has shed new light on the mysterious swimming motion of plesiosaurs, ancient marine reptiles that roamed the Earth’s oceans during the Mesozoic era.
The Four-Wing Problem
Plesiosaurs’ unique body structure, featuring four large, equally sized flippers, has sparked intense debate about how they moved through the water. The “four-wing problem” has been a topic of discussion among paleontologists for years, with many theories proposed but none proven conclusively.
A Novel Approach
A team of researchers from Tohoku University, Kanagawa University, and the University of Manchester took a novel approach to tackling this problem. By developing a bio-inspired control system, they successfully modeled the swimming motion of plesiosaurs.
Breakthrough Discovery
The results of the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, show that the control system successfully generated coordinated patterns between the fore and hind flippers in response to changes in the flapping cycle and morphology.
Implications for Paleontology
This breakthrough discovery has significant implications for the field of paleontology. The development of a bio-inspired control system provides a new framework for understanding the movement patterns of extinct animals.
Read the Full Study
Fukuhara, A., Sato, M., Ogawa, H., Sato, T., Sellers, W., & Ishiguro, A. (2024). Rethinking the four-wing problem in plesiosaur swimming using bio-inspired decentralized control. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 1-12. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-55805-z
