Earliest Animal Footprints EVER... Show Creatures Walked The Earth 570 MILLION Years Ago!!!!!!!

by **J The Kidd** Thu Oct 09, 2008 12:01 am

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 centipede-like 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.

Earliest Animal Footprints EVER... Show Creatures Walked The Earth 570 MILLION Years Ago!!!!!!! FUCKYOUPAYMEMOSTUNDERRATEDOVERWORKEDUNDERPAID

Scientists once thought that it was primarily microbes and simple
multicellular animals that existed prior to the Cambrian period.

'We keep talking about the possibility of more complex animals in
the Ediacaran - soft corals, some anthropods and flatworms - but the
evidence has not been totally convincing,' said Loren Babock, professor
of earth sciences at Ohio State University.

'But if you find the evidence, like we did, of an animal with legs - an
animal walking around - then that makes the possibility much more
likely.'

Soo-Yeun Ahn, a doctoral student at Ohio State, presented the discovery at the Geological Society of America in Houston.

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

'We came on an outcrop that looked like it crossed the
Precambrian-Cambrian boundary, so we stopped to take a look at it.,'
said Babock.

'We just sat down and started flipping rocks over. We were there less than an hour when I saw it.'

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.