Fossilized claw tracks discovered in Australia show that the animal group that includes reptiles, mammals and birds formed earlier than expected

Led by Uppsala & Flinders universities, the study published in Nature credits citizen science for the find & suggests tetrapods may have 1st emerged in Gondwana, not Northern Hemisphere.

The footprints of a reptile-like creature appear to have been laid down around 356 million years ago, pushing back the earliest known instance of animals emerging from the water to live on land

New fossilized tracks made by an ancient reptile indicate that these animals evolved tens of millions of years sooner than scientists first thought.

Scientists in Australia have identified the oldest known fossil footprints of a reptile-like animal, dated to around 350 million years ago. The discovery suggests that after the first animals emerged from the ocean around 400 million years ago,