nature in a experiment i have no yet why is like so far like it sounds so simple they had no idea

but now the data's i find this not only refreshing but but at some level astounding nature

welcome back to the nature podcast. This week we'll be finding out how a fossilised

animal walked and hearing about a potential role for the so-called junk DNA within genes.

I'm Charlotte Stoddart. And I'm Benjamin Thompson.

Somewhere around the late Devonian era, perhaps 360 million years ago, vertebrates started to invade the land, dragging themselves out of the water and expanding into pastures new.

The first land invaders were likely to be pretty hopeless at moving about on land, but as time went on, terrestrial creatures would

evolve, developing ever more sophisticated mechanisms for getting about. But what did that evolutionary

journey look like? And how can we know? We may be able to see fossils of creatures which were

present at the time, but there is a big difference between a pile of bones

and a moving animal. Now, a team led by John Niakatura from Humboldt University in Berlin

has used a host of techniques to try and work out how a crocodile-like creature from about

280 million years ago might have moved, in the hopes of better understanding the great transition to land.

Noah Baker called him up to find out more.

Tell me about the animal that you've been studying in this particular paper.

We have been studying Orobates Papstey from the Lower Permian, about 300 million years old. And it's a beautifully preserved

fossil, complete and articulated. And moreover, there's fossil trackways which have been assigned

to Orobatis from the same fossil locality, which is very rare. What was your approach to work out how this creature might have moved?

What was the first step, I suppose?

We used a highly multidisciplinary approach.

First, we were interested in how modern animals use sprawling tetrapot locomotion.

So we studied four modern species, extant species,

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