Trailblazing Tracks: Earliest Reptile Footprints Step All Over Evolution’s Timeline

A groundbreaking discovery in southeastern Australia has shattered the traditional schedule of vertebrate evolution: 355-million-year-old reptile footprints have been unearthed, pushing the origin of reptiles-and their amniote relatives-forward by at least 35 million years. The claw marks, preserved in a piece of sandstone, show the distinctive long toes and clear claw impressions, irresistibly assigning them to early reptiles rather than amphibians.

 

The theory was that the oldest reptile fossils previously known were about 320 million years old, but  this new find shows that reptiles evolved much earlier, so  the process of land vertebrate evolution must have happened faster than  previously thought. Not only does the find contradict the theory that significant  evolutionary processes were limited to the Northern Hemisphere, but it also points  to a more varied, more complex early tetrapod fauna in Gondwana.

 

Source: Phys.org, Reuters, ZME Science