The oldest animal-track fossil ever found was made by a tiny, crabby creature

[Judi Lynn]

WRITTEN BY
Katherine Ellen Foley
OBSESSION
Life as Laboratory
40 mins ago

Some 550 million years ago, the continents of Earth were largely empty. Plants hadn’t yet covered the land, and what animals there were (mostly insect-like trilobites and ancestors of worms), swam in the vast ocean.

The evolutionary jump that took animal life from the waters to the land is poorly understood. All researchers know is that around that time, there was a sudden birth of a variety of types of animal evolution, some of which grew legs and started breathing air. Scientists call it the Cambrian explosion. Those creatures led to the dinosaurs some 480 million years ago, and eventually to us humans.

Thanks to a new fossil record uncovered in the Wuhe county of the Three Gorges area in southern China, scientists now know the first lifeform to make its way out of ocean likely scuttled. In a paper published Wednesday (June 6), the team describes the oldest record of animal footprints ever found, from between 550 million and 540 million years ago. These footprints provide evidence of a tiny creature that walked on two little legs and was capable of burrowing in the sediment at the edge of the water and land.

“It’s difficult to say [exactly] what this animal was,” says Shuhai Xiao, a paleobiologist at Virginia Tech and lead author of the study. Without a tiny fossilized corpse next to the footprints, scientists can’t know much for sure about the creature’s physical appearance.

More:
https://qz.com/1298847/the-oldest-animal-footprints-ever-were-made-550-million-years-ago-in-china/

[marylandblue]

1. Was the creature crabby because its house was full of pond scum?

[cyclonefence]

2. It walked on *two* legs?

What kind of primitive creature could walk on two legs? Besides Republicans, I mean. But seriously, two legs?

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Badly written article. The paper never talks about "two legs", but "paired appendages"

"bilaterian animals with paired appendages", more likely to be arthropod-like (crustacean etc.) than annelid (worms).

"Those creatures led to the dinosaurs some 480 million years ago" is wrong too; 480 million years ago, we had jawless fish, but not jawed ones.

[cyclonefence]

4. Thanks

I did read the article, and I saw the "paired appendages" and wondered if that's where the "two legs" came from. I had the image of a two-legged crab? spider? something balancing itself and hobbling along the muck. Thanks for clearing this up.

Volestrangler, eh? How do you catch the little bastards--they're way too fast for me!

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. Ask John Cleese

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Golden-Wing-commander-Muriel-Volestrangler-F-R-H-S/dp/0413415600

or even Marty Feldman and Barry Took:

Recurring characters included actors Binkie Huckaback and Dame Celia Molestrangler (Paddick and Marsden) playing old-fashioned cinema idols Fiona and Charles, declaring their love for one another in stilted nonsensical dialogue.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/roundthehorne/