A feast of fossil footprints - October 17, 2007
Reptiles have been around a little longer than we thought, a stunning fossil find reveals. Footprints found in New Brunswick, Canada push back the date of the first reptiles, which evolved around 315 million years ago. “The evolution of reptiles was one of the most important events in the whole history of life,” said the fossil’s finder Dr Howard Falcon-Lang, a paelontologist at the University of Bristol (BBC, Times).
Previously the oldest evidence of reptiles was fossils found in 1859. The new footprints were found in the same region as the previous fossils but about a kilometre lower in the rock strata, meaning they are between one and three million years older. The findings are reported in the Journal of the Geological Society. “There were only a few species capable of making prints like this around at the time so we came up with a short-list of suspects. However, the prints showed that the hands had five fingers and scales, sure evidence they were made by reptiles and not amphibians,” said one of Falcon-Lang’s co-authors on the paper Mike Benton (press release).
In a strangely similar story researchers working in Germany are claiming to have found the oldest footprints positively identified, after fossils of two ‘reptile-like’ animals from 290 million years ago were matched to fossil tracks (Live Science). Their results are published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Image: Howard Falcon-Lang
