An insane discovery of the ‘earliest footprints ever’ has been made and they date all the way back to 350 million years ago.
Experts have since revealed that this could ‘completely rewrite’ the theory of evolution.
A team of researchers uncovered the fossil footprints found in sandstone in Australia which appear to be of a reptile-like creature.
The footprints have long toes with hooked claws and were located near Melbourne, although at the time this creature was alive Australia was part of the supercontinent Gondwana.
Advert
If accurate, this is expected to push the timeline of terrestrial life back by millions of years.
While its known that life on Earth began in the ocean with aquatic creatures who eventually evolved into land animals, scientists are still working out when exactly the transition occurred.
And now it looks like this new evidence could push it back even further.
Previously, the oldest known footprints were found in Canada and date back to 318 million years ago but this new discovery is even older.
It is estimated that the first arrival of aquatic animals coming to the land happened about 400 million years ago but this new fossil has thrown that into question.
This is because the timeline surrounding the development of aquatic creatures into land-dwelling animals has now been shortened.
The research team is estimating that the footprints in question come from an animals that was around two and a half feet long and possibly looked like a modern-day monitor lizard.
Speaking to the Express, Uppsala University’s Professor Per Ahlberg, who led the study, said: “I’m stunned. A single track-bearing slab, which one person can lift, calls into question everything we thought we knew about when modern tetrapods evolved.”
The expert went on to confirm that it is in fact a ‘walking animal’, adding: “The combination of the claw scratches and the shape of the feet suggests that the track maker was a primitive reptile.”
The presence of claws confirmed for the scientists that it is a land animal only, because the earliest creatures that relied on water environments never developed claws.
It’s now thought that this fossil is the earliest piece of evidence on Earth of animals with claws.
According to John Long, who is a paleontologist at Flinders University in Australia and also a co-author of the study, the fossil’s ‘trackways are beautiful because they tell you how something lived, not just what something looked like’.