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Earliest animal footprints 570m years ago


Owlscrying

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A fossilized trail of an aquatic creature indicates that animals walked using legs 570 million years ago - at least 30 million years earlier than had been previously thought.

The tracks of two parallel rows of small dots, each about two millimetres in diameter, show the multi-legged creature walked over the bed of an ancient sea once covering Nevada.

The trackway dates back to the Ediacaran which preceded the Cambrian period, the time when most major groups of animals first evolved.

The tracks were discovered by accident near Goldfield, Nevada in 2000 by Babock and J. Stewart Hollingsworth of the Institute for Cambrian Studies.

The creatures must have stepped lightly onto the soft marine sediment because its' legs only pressed shallow pinpoints into that long-ago sea bed.

Babock suspected the tracks were made by an anthropod, such as a centipede or milipede, or by a leg-bearing worm.

In 2002, other researchers reported a similar fossil trail from Canada that dated back to the middle of the Cambrian period, about 520 million years ago. Another set of tracks found in South China date back to 540 million years ago.

The shallow sea covering western Nevada 570 million years ago would have been a good site for exceptional preservation. The sediment surface was probably bound together by a microbial mat - a cohesive carpet of bacteria and sediment grains.

Babock will continue to look in the same region of Nevada, but similar fossils might also be found in the White Sea area of Russia, South Australia, Newfoundland or Namibia, where body fossils of Ediacaran organisms have been found.

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