{"id":248556,"date":"2025-05-20T05:35:14","date_gmt":"2025-05-20T05:35:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/aerospace\/fossil-hunters-discover-earliest-known-footprints-of-a-reptile-like-creature-pushing-back-the-timeline-of-their-evolution\/"},"modified":"2025-05-20T05:35:14","modified_gmt":"2025-05-20T05:35:14","slug":"fossil-hunters-discover-earliest-known-footprints-of-a-reptile-like-creature-pushing-back-the-timeline-of-their-evolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=248556","title":{"rendered":"Fossil Hunters Discover Earliest Known Footprints of a Reptile-Like Creature, Pushing Back the Timeline of Their Evolution"},"content":{"rendered":"


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A new study suggests two fossil trackways found in Australia were made by an early amniote, a group that today includes reptiles, birds and mammals<\/h2>\n
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Sara Hashemi<\/a><\/p>\n

– Daily Correspondent<\/span><\/p>\n

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Amateur fossil hunters discovered a trackway left by a creature that might have looked like the one in this illustration. The finding raises new questions about the evolution of the earliest reptiles.
\n Marcin Ambrozik<\/span>
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Scientists in Australia have identified the earliest known tracks of a reptile-like animal, suggesting these creatures walked the Earth millions of years longer than thought.<\/p>\n

The two trackways were spotted by builder Craig Eury and winemaker John Eason, who were fossil hunting along a river bed in eastern Victoria, Australia. \u201cIt was literally the footprints that caught my eye\u2014the light hit the rock in a way that cast a shadow on the footprints,\u201d Eury tells Jacinta Bowler and Annie Brown at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation<\/a>. Both are now listed as co-authors on a new study of the fossils, published in the journal Nature<\/em><\/a>\u00a0last week.\u00a0<\/p>\n

John Long<\/a>, a paleontologist at Flinders University in Australia and the study\u2019s lead author, had enlisted amateur paleontologists such as Eury and Eason to look for fossils in the area. He was shocked when he saw what the two had found.<\/p>\n

The prints appeared to be from an early four-legged creature classified as an amniote<\/a>, or an animal with eggs that contain \u201camniotic membranes\u201d to protect the fetus. While the earliest amniotes looked like lizards, they ultimately gave rise to the branches on the animal evolutionary tree that became today\u2019s reptiles, birds and mammals.<\/p>\n

Eason and Eury \u201chit the mother lode with this trackway,\u201d says Long to Joel Achenbach at the <\/em>Washington Post<\/em><\/a>. \u201cThis is the oldest evidence in the world of amniote trackways\u2014the lineage that will eventually end up as humans. It\u2019s huge.\u201d<\/p>\n

The scientists dated the fossil to between 354 million and 359 million years ago, which would mean that amniotes existed at least 35 million years earlier than previously thought. That places the creatures as having lived during the early Carboniferous period<\/a>, a time when Earth was covered in trees, and vast deposits of coal were beginning to form.<\/p>\n

To conduct their study, researchers analyzed the two discovered trackways, which criss-cross on a 14-inch sandstone slab. The fossilized rock is covered in dimples from raindrops, hinting at a shower just before the tracks were made\u2014and indicating the amniotes were likely moving on dry land, as some of the paper\u2019s authors write in an article for the Conversation<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

The footprints also have claw marks, which are not seen in amphibian tracks, and they\u2019re five-toed, another sign that points to amniotes. Some of them left long scratches from dragging the foot.<\/p>\n

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350 million year old reptile tracks<\/p>\n

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