The first animal to crawl onto land from the ocean probably looked a bit like today’s salamander, and researchers have wondered how it was able to switch from swimming to walking.

Now, European scientists have built a robot with a primitive electric nervous system that they say mimics that change in motion.

The robot doesn’t look much like a salamander–it’s nearly a yard long and made of nine bright yellow plastic segments each containing a battery and microcontroller–but it does seem to move like one.