In the ongoing history of evolutionary change, there are few transformations as celebrated as the time when fossil humans gave up a life in the trees for one walking upright on the ground. It’s so special to us that, rightly or wrongly, the ability to strut about on two pillar-like legs has often been taken as the de facto evidence for membership in the hominin family. We often forget that other creatures pulled the same feat hundreds of millions of years before us.

Way back in Triassic time, when our mammalian ancestors were scuttling around on bowed limbs, both dinosaurs and extinct crocodile cousins called poposaurs chased around the forests and floodplains on two legs held directly