I'm not quite sure what the point of this exercise is unless the scientists are like Adam, trying to create cyborg warriors. There is no guarantee that the simulations would be any better than educated guesses. Nor is there much of a good idea in making metal skeletons. Bone already has the strength of mild steel and has the advantage that it can heal from injuries. And don't forget, bone marrow is where red blood cells come from. We still have unanswered questions from that era: which dinosaurs were warm-blooded and which were cold-blooded? This is a major input to the simulation since muscles from these two types of animals were different and we don't really know.
The excuse that robots would shed light on evolution seems really far-fetched. We don't know much about the forces that shaped evolution and the forces that we would apply to a robot would never duplicate what actually happened in the era of the dinosaur. In the Jurassic period, the average temperature of the earth was 5°C higher than it is now and the oxygen in the air was at about 30%. A real dinosaur from that era would have a hard time living today.
This appears to be just a means of getting funding for a few scientists to create a project to keep themselves employed but I can't take seriously any idea that this would give us "insights" into how evolution worked back then. If you want to simulate something, you have to know details of what you are simulating and these guys don't know much.
www.theguardian.com
