Fossil tracks record 'oldest land-walkers'

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Fossil tracks record 'oldest land-walkers'
OP - January 07, 2010, 07:38 AM

The oldest evidence of four-legged animals walking on land has been discovered in southeast Poland.

Rocks from a disused quarry record the "footprints" of unknown creatures that lived about 397 million years ago.

Scientists tell the journal Nature that the fossil trackways even retain the impressions left by the "toes" on the animals' feet.

The team says the find means that land vertebrates appeared millions of years earlier than previously supposed.

"This place has yielded what I consider to be some of the most exciting fossils I've ever encountered in my career as a palaeontologist," said team member Per Ahlberg from Uppsala University, Sweden.

"[They are] fossil of footprints that give us the earliest record of how our very distant ancestors moved out of the water and moved on to the land and took their first steps."

Numerous trackways have been identified in the Zachelmie Quarry in the Holy Cross Mountains.

They represent the movements of many animals as they scurried around what would have been a tropical muddy shoreline in the Middle Devonian Period of Earth history.

Slabs of carbonate rock are dappled with prints that range in size and detail.

Some indentations are obscured where successive animals have trampled over the same patch of ground; but others retain exquisite features of the pads and digits that made them.

The animals were probably crocodile-like in appearance and lived an amphibian-like existence (although those specific animal forms did not appear until many millions of years later).

The dimensions of the prints suggest some individuals were more than two metres long.

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Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8443879.stm

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Re: Fossil tracks record 'oldest land-walkers'
Reply #1 - January 07, 2010, 08:44 AM

nice one, thanks for sharing
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Re: Fossil tracks record 'oldest land-walkers'
Reply #2 - January 10, 2010, 01:01 AM

Cool. Nice find. Per Ahlberg rocks. He used to post at some other sites I frequented (don't know if he still does) and he's really down to earth with a good sense of humour. He emailed me the original paper (which he largely wrote) on the Tiktaalik fossils. It was a YEC ass-kicking thread he quoted the paper in and he said if anyone wanted a copy all they had to do was give him their email, which was nice of him.

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Re: Fossil tracks record 'oldest land-walkers'
Reply #3 - January 10, 2010, 02:34 AM

Os where to find his email please?

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Re: Fossil tracks record 'oldest land-walkers'
Reply #4 - January 10, 2010, 02:44 AM

This is his page at the uni site: http://katalog.uu.se/empInfo/?id=N3-984

but I don't think he would mind if I emailed you a copy of the PDF since he was giving them away.

Oh and having checked up it wasn't the paper. It was the first article in Nature magazine, which in some ways is better than the paper since papers tend to be really dense and confusing reading for non-specialists. Lotsa nasty words you've never heard of, etc.

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Re: Fossil tracks record 'oldest land-walkers'
Reply #5 - January 10, 2010, 02:51 AM

Oh that will be nice, yeah please email me the article. Thanks!

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Re: Fossil tracks record 'oldest land-walkers'
Reply #6 - January 12, 2010, 08:13 AM

Hey there's a short video about this.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2010/jan/05/first-tetrapods-walked-earth

And I've asked for a PDF of the paper so that should be interesting.

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Re: Fossil tracks record 'oldest land-walkers'
Reply #7 - January 12, 2010, 08:37 AM

Wow this is fantastic! Really exciting. I love his accent haha a mix of British and Swedish.
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Re: Fossil tracks record 'oldest land-walkers'
Reply #8 - January 12, 2010, 10:27 AM

Interesting find - I always assumed land animals with elongated fins would have developed first before toes but then this makes sense. They would have not been able to climb the muddy banks without this additional gripping ability..

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Re: Fossil tracks record 'oldest land-walkers'
Reply #9 - January 12, 2010, 10:32 AM

That isn't what this is about. The area they were found in was tidal mud flats. No climbing required. This is just about feet being around much earlier than was thought.

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Re: Fossil tracks record 'oldest land-walkers'
Reply #10 - January 12, 2010, 10:34 AM

But what happens now? With the previous information? I mean this goes back 20 million years.

Also, what are other scientists within his field saying?
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Re: Fossil tracks record 'oldest land-walkers'
Reply #11 - January 12, 2010, 10:37 AM

Nothing wrong with the previous information. We just have more now.

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