Robot salamander

[Skylace]

[img]http://blog.wired.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/_42658521_sallake_epfl_203b.jpg[/img]
A French-Swiss team is using a robot to figure out how early reptiles walked, slithered and swam.

"By mimicking the nervous system and the movements of the salamander, the team hoped "to decode perhaps some of what happened during evolution", Auke Jan Ijspeert, of Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, told BBC News."

The research harks back to the Devonian Period, some 360 million year ago, when palaeontologists believe limbs first began to develop out of the fins of more maritime creatures. The beaches on which we now lounge, fat and suburned, were once the front lines of natural selection. They're testing the bot on the shores of Lake Geneva