How SALAMANDER found his legs

The first animal to crawl onto land from the ocean probably looked a bit like today's salamander and researchers have wondered how it was able to switch from swimming to walking. Now, European scientists have built a robot with a primitive electric nervous system that they say mimics that change in motion.

So they first designed a basic nervous system modeled on that of the lamprey, a long, primitive eel-like fish. Then that design was modified to show how it could evolve into a nervous system that also could control walking.

Its swimming motion uses undulations like the lamprey, while on land the robot uses a slow stepping gait with diagonally opposed limbs moving together while the body forms an S-shape.

"We were trying to understand what really happened during the transition from primitive fishes to amphibians, like the salamander," said "We were trying to understand what really happened during the transition from primitive fishes to amphibians, like the salamander," said physicist Auke Ijspeert.

Storyteller: Auke Ijspeert, a physicist of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

Story reteller: Jeanna Bryner http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,257938,00.html

Story reteller: Randolph E. Schmid http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=12363

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