The interdisciplinary reconstruction project “Orobates” was published in the January issue of Nature, the world’s most prestigious journal for natural sciences. Jonas Lauströer and Amir Andikfar are lecturers in the subject area Knowledge Visualization and co-authors of the publication – their visualization appears on the front page of the journal. The article documents the digital reconstruction of the fossil terrestrial vertebrate Orobates pabsti and illuminates the topic of “Robotic Palaeontology”. As part of an international research collaboration, the fossils were digitized, reconstructed into a digital 3D model and animated, and finally recreated in the form of a robot. Behind the project stands an interdisciplinary team of experts from Humboldt University Berlin (main author Prof. Dr. John A. Nyakatura) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), with the support of Knowledge Visualization, ZHdK.
Link to Nature and the original publication
Link to the presentation page of EPFL
Link to the news page of EPFL
3D model of the reconstructed skeleton. The skeleton fossil of Orobates pabsti. 3D visualization of the skeleton in motion, fitted with fossilized footprints.
