Paleo-robots and toilet paper

In my daily newsletter from MIT Technology Review today, there was a (paywalled) story about paleo robots as models of prehistoric animals: "In the last few years, paleontologists have developed a new trick for turning back time and studying prehistoric animals: building experimental robotic models of them.

I found an October 2024 open-access Science Magazine Robotics Review article "Paleoinspired robotics as an experimental approach to the history of life" (link in the comments) that describes a few examples of that approach, which consists of replicating sparse fossil observations. It is a great review article and I recommend it. But it misses one reference that made a mark on me: the 1997 article by Tony Prescott and Carl Ibbotson, "The early evolution of spatial behaviour: robot models of trace fossils" published in the The MIT Press journal Artificial Life (which I was then and still happen to be an editor of). The authors used a Lego toilet roll dispenser robot to mimic the fossil tracks left by various prehistoric creatures. It is probably the earliest paper I can think of that uses that approach and I find it clever extremely elegant by its simplicity.

Below are images from the paper: from left to right, fist column are trace fossil meanders, second column is computer simulations and the third column shows examples of toilet paper tracks.