In a small office north of London, Stephanie Pierce from the Royal Veterinary College is watching a movement that hasn’t been seen for 360 million years. On her computer, she has resurrected the long-extinct Ichthyostega – one of the earliest four-legged animals to creep about on land. By recreating this iconic beast as a virtual skeleton, Pierce has shown that while it looked like a giant salamander, it couldn’t possibly have walked like one. It had some of the planet’s earliest bony legs, but they weren’t very good at taking steps.

Ichthyostega hails from the Devonian period, a time in Earth’s history when swimming transformed into walking. Fish invaded the land and evolved into the first tetrapods—four-limbed animals that include amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals.  Muscular fins used for steering and balance evolved into legs for walking.

Since its discovery over 50 years ago, Ichthyostega has been an icon of this pivotal transition. Some 300 specimens have been found but many are incomplete, flattened or distorted. Pierce’s new model provides the best look yet at the animal’s skeleton. “It makes Ichthyostega a bit more tangible,” she says. “It’s not just a fossil laying in a rock now. It’s an animal that’s coming to life.”

Pierce built her virtual skeleton by putting dozens of Ichthyostega specimens in powerful CT-scanners, choosing only the best preserved ones out of the 300 or so in existence. “The front end of the animal was mainly composed from one beautifully preserved specimen called ‘Mr Magic’,” she says.

It was painstaking work. These fossils are so old that chemically, they are almost identical to the rocks around them. By eye, the bones stand out. To the scanners, they blend in. Pierce spent over two years scanning the specimens and building her model, but the results were worth it. “This has been on the wish-list for years,” says Michael Coates, who studies tetrapod evolution at the University of Chicago.

Those boots weren’t made for walking…

The model showed that Ichthyostega’s shoulders and hips were oddly restricted. They could move back and forth, and up and down, but they couldn’t rotate about their long axis. Hold your arm out and rotate your palm so it faces up then down—Ichthyostega’s shoulder couldn’t do that.

Most modern tetrapods need long-axis rotation in order to walk. Without it, their legs can’t be thrown forward or pulled backward. Ichthyostega’s limitations meant that despite having four limbs, it probably couldn’t have taken a step. It hind feet would never have been planted flat against the ground or supported its weight. It had invaded the land, but it wasn’t striding across it.

“It highlights the fact that the earliest tetrapods are not just ‘gigantic salamanders’, despite a vague similarity in outline,” says Per Ahlberg from Uppsala University. “The limbs and girdles are very different from anything now living.”

Pierce thinks that Ichthyostega moved by paddle with its front limbs, using powerful muscles and flexible elbows to make rowing motions. The closest living analogue is probably the mudskipper – a fish that drags itself along muddy land with its front fins (as in the video below).

Pierce also compared Ichthyostega’s joints and limbs to those of other living animals with sinuous bodies and interesting gaits, including a salamander, crocodile, seal, otter and platypus. Compared to these modern species, Ichthyostega’s hips and shoulders were similarly flexible in most planes of movements, but along their long axis, they could barely rotate.

Some scientists think that the tetrapods evolved limbs before they could walk, and their first members lived in shallow water. Others think that it’s the other way round, and that muscular limbs, hips and shoulders evolved while fish still had fins. The virtual Ichthyostega supports the former idea, since it had limbs but couldn’t walk. But Coates cautions against “fitting a smooth transition from swimmers to walkers.” He says, “Evolutionary transitions needn’t follow linear routes. Ichthyostega probably represents one of multiple experiments among the first tetrapods with limbs, trying-out life in the shallows.”

So… what made those tracks?

Other early tetrapods had similar shoulders and hips, so they probably had the same limitations too. John Hutchinson, who led the new study, plans to find out. His lab is busy reconstructing other early tetrapods including Acanthostega, one of Ichthyostega’s contemporaries, and Pederpes, a later model.

But Ahlberg notes that Ichthyostega had a very unusual and rigid spine, and may not have been representative of other early tetrapods. “Other tetrapods are known to have had more flexible spines” he says, “and this probably allowed them to overcome the limitations of their shoulders and hips”.

This might explain why Ahlberg and others have discovered tracks that pre-date Ichthyostega by around 20 million years, and had become fairly common by the time it evolved. Many of these tracks showed precisely the kind of salamander-like movements that Ichthyostega was apparently incapable of making. They were clearly made by early four-legged tetrapods, and to this date, we don’t know what made them.

Pierce agrees that the final word on Ichthyostega’s movements will have to wait until she can animate its entire skeleton. “The ultimate goal would be to try and create some sort of dynamic movement,” she says. She has applied for a grant to do just that, to model the motions of the entire animal, and compare them to salamanders or crocodiles. “That’s going to take so much time, but it’ll be very interesting,” she says.

PS: I want to point out that in researching this story, I spent a good minute on my living room floor trying to walk without long-axis rotation. It was really hard, and I looked like an idiot. I did a similar thing when I was writing about hummingbird wing movements for Nature. I’m going to christen this Method Science Journalism.

Reference: Pierce, Clack & Hutchinson. 2012. Three-dimensional limb joint mobility in the early tetrapod Ichthyostega. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature11124

Image by Julie Molnar

More on tetrapods:

Fossil tracks push back the invasion of land by 18 million years

Fish fins and mouse feet controlled by the same ancient genetic switch

On an uneventful day, five passers-by in busy Oxford shopping street suddenly stop and look upwards. They have spotted a camera mounted on a nearby roof, pointed straight at them. But these aren’t strangers who have suddenly realised that Big Brother is watching them. They are actors, who are taking part in a natural experiment that looks at how information spreads through crowds of people.

Andrew Gallup from Princeton University is behind the camera. Using its lens, and technology based on the video-gaming graphics cards, he can track the movement of each pedestrian, and calculate where they’re looking. With this set-up confirmed that people have a natural tendency to look where others are looking. But this contagion of glancing is much weaker than popular psychology books would have us believe.

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Even the topmost layer of the ocean, just millimetres below the air above, is full of life. This zone, where two worlds meet, is home to small creatures like animal larvae, algae, bacteria, and other plankton. Among the most abundant residents of this zone are copepods – tiny relatives of crabs and shrimp. And some of them have the ability to leave this world altogether, and take to the air.

When threatened by fish, some copepods can jump straight out of the water and shoot over many times their own body lengths. From the fish’s point of view, its prey suddenly disappears.  Flying fish use the same tactic to escape from predators. Now, we know that one of the most common groups of ocean animals shares their strategy.

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In the desert of the United Arab Emirates, there is an unusual series of flat discs imprinted in the sand.  Each one is about 40 centimetres wide, and they snake off into the distance in several parallel lines, for hundreds of metres.

They are tracks. They were made by a herd of at least 14 early elephants, marching across the land between 6 and 8 million years ago. The track-makers are long dead, but in the intervening time, nothing has buried their tracks or eroded them away. Today, their social lives are still recorded in their fossilised footsteps.

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What do a leaping lizard, a Velociraptor and a tiny robot at Bob Full’s laboratory have in common? They all use their tails to correct the angle of their bodies when they jump.

Thomas Libby filmed rainbow agamas – a beautiful species with the no-frills scientific name of Agama agama – as they leapt from a horizontal platform onto a vertical wall. Before they jumped, they first had to vault onto a small platform. If the platform was covered in sandpaper, which provided a good grip, the agama could angle its body perfectly. In slow motion, it looks like an arrow, launching from platform to wall in a smooth arc (below, left)

If the platform was covered in a slippery piece of card, the agama lost its footing and it leapt at the wrong angle. It ought to have face-planted into the wall, but Libby found that it used its long, slender tail to correct itself (below, right). If its nose was pointing down, the agama could tilt it back up by swinging its tail upwards.

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In flight, the hovering hummingbird is more like a insect than a bird. Most most birds only create lift when they flap downwards. But the hummingbird, by flipping its wing before it flaps upwards, can create lift in both directions. Insects do the same thing, but their wings have no bones inside them. How does the hummingbird fly like a fly despite having the bones of a bird?

Tyson Hedrick has found out, by filming hovering hummers with high-speed X-ray cameras. I’ve written about the results in my new piece for Nature News, so go there and read the full story (including details about how hummingbird muscles work at high gear). The meat of it is this:

By filming ruby-throated hummingbirds (Archilochus colubris) in flight, Hedrick showed that the birds invert their wings by twisting their wrists. “It looks like it’s affecting the whole wing because the bird’s skeleton is very compressed and its wrist isn’t very far from its shoulder,” says Hedrick.

In most birds, the wrist collapses on the upstroke to draw the wing towards the body as it is raised. Hummingbirds have adapted the same movements to rotate their wings instead. “The usual mechanism makes the upstroke aerodynamically invisible,” says Hedrick. “The hummingbirds’ mechanism makes the upstroke aerodynamically effective.”

The videos also showed that hummingbirds flap their wings by twisting the humerus (upper arm bone), rather than flapping it up and down from the shoulder like other birds. To understand the difference, Hedrick recommends trying to mimic a bird by flapping your arms. “You’re doing something not too different to what a seagull’s doing,” he says. To mimic a hummingbird, “hold your upper arm close to your body with your elbow on your hip, and flap your forearms back and forth”.

Go try it. You can look as stupid as I did when I was writing about the paper.

Photo by Joe Schneid

If it looks like a grasshopper, and jumps like a grasshopper, it might be a cockroach. Last year, Mike Picker from the University of Cape Town discovered a new species of cockroach (Saltoblattela montistabularis) that jumps about using unusually long legs.

Dubbed the “leaproach“, the insect was named one of the top ten new species of 2011. Picker actually found it in 2006 while searching for an unrelated species of fly. It is a close relative of that famous pest, the German cockroach, but its body is very different. Its hind legs are huge, and around 70 per cent of its movements consist of jumps and hops. That makes it unique; all the rest of the 4,000 or so cockroach species get around by scuttling. Only one prehistoric species, which lived in the Jurassic period, had the legs of a jumper.

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We’re in western America in the late Jurassic period, and a herd of Camarasaurus dinosaurs is on the move. It’s the dry season and the giants are running out of water. Fortunately, they know exactly where to find a drink: a range of volcanic highlands to the west. To quench their titanic thirst, they must head for the hills. Now, 150 million years later, Henry Fricke from Colorado College had discovered a way of reconstructing their migration.

Vast migrations are a common feature among modern animals, and it’s reasonable to think that some dinosaurs undertook similar treks. But how do you work out the routes of long-extinct animals, when you only know about the spot where they died? The answer, as with many aspects of dinosaur life, is to look at their skeletons. As well as revealing the shape and size of these beasts, dinosaur fossils can also hold a record of their travel plans.

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Imagine you’re living off the coast of California, and you want to get to sunny Florida. That sounds easy enough, but there are three big problems in this imaginary scenario. First, you are a snail, so crossing even a small distance takes a lot of time. Second, there is a continent in the way. Third, you are a sea snail so you are not adapted to crawling on land.

These problems seem insurmountable and yet snails have made the journey. Osamu Miura from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute has found that horn snails crossed from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean around 750,000 years ago, while other individuals made the opposite journey around 72,000 years ago. And they probably flew on bird airlines.

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Many birds sing to woo females, but some hummingbirds go to great lengths to do so. They climb to between 5 and 40 metres before plummeting past perched females in death-defying dives. They pull up at the last minute, spread their tail feathers and produce a loud chirpy song. The song comes not from the birds’ mouths, but from their tails. The splayed tail feathers vibrate as air rushes past them, causing them to flutter.

Flutter sounds colloquial and innocuous, but it can be deadly. It’s what happens when air, moving at just the right speed, zooms past objects with just the right stiffness, setting up large and potentially disastrous vibrations. Flutter brought down the passenger plane Braniff Airways Flight 542, killing everyone on board. Flutter wrecked the Tahoma Narrows Bridge, causing it to warp and twist like a piece of rope. But flutter also ensures that male hummingbirds get some action.

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