Robot re-creates the gait of 290-million-year-old creature based on fossil find in Germany

WASHINGTON - How did the earliest land animals move? Scientists have used a nearly 300-million-year-old fossil skeleton and preserved ancient footprints to create a moving robot model of prehistoric life. Evolutionary biologist John Nyakatura at Humboldt University in Berlin has spent years studying a 290-million-year-old fossil dug up in central Germany's Bromacker quarry in 2000. The four-legged plant-eater lived before the dinosaurs and fascinates scientists "because of its position on the tree of life," said Nyakatura. Researchers believe the creature is a "stem amniote" -- an early land-dwelling animal that later evolved into modern mammals, birds and reptiles.