A stunning video based on fossils of a 410-million-year-old arachnid – one of the first predators on land – recreates the way the animals walked.
The researchers used exceptionally preserved fossils from the Natural History Museum in London to create a video showing the most likely walking style of the animal, which has just been published in a special issue of the Journal of Paleontology.
Dr Russell Garwood from the University of Manchester UK, working with Dr Jason Dunlop at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, used fossils preserved in cross section in thin slices of rock to work out the range of motion in the limbs of this ancient, extinct early relative of the spiders.
From this, and comparison to living arachnids, the researchers used an open source computer graphic program called Blender to create a video showing the animals walking.
“When it comes to early life on land, long before our ancestors came out of the sea, these early arachnids were top dog of the food chain”, said author Dr Russell Garwood, a palaeontologist in the University of Manchester’s School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences. “They are now extinct, but from about 300 to 400 million years ago, seem to have been more widespread than spiders. Now we can use the tools of computer graphics to better understand recreate how they might have moved - all from thin slivers of rock, showing the joints in their legs.”
Co-author Jason Dunlop, arachnid curator at the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, said: “These fossils - from a rock called the Rhynie chert - are unusually well-preserved. During my PhD I could build up a pretty good idea of their appearance in life. This new study has gone further and shows us how they probably walked. For me, what’s really exciting here is that scientists themselves can make these animations now, without needing the technical wizardry (and immense costs) of a Jurassic-Park style film. When I started working on fossil arachnids we were happy if we could manage a sketch of what they used to look like; now they run across our computer screens.”
This work is part of a special collection of papers on three-dimensional visualization and analysis of fossils published in the Journal of Paleontology
Dr Garwood added: “Using open source software means that this is something anyone could do at home, while allowing us to understand these early land animals better than ever before.”
Reference: Garwood, R. J. & Dunlop, J. A. 2014. The walking dead: blender as a tool for palaeontologists with a case study on extinct arachnids. Journal of Paleontology. DOI: 10.5061/dryad.1v2s7