Thursday, March 8, 2012

[Geology2] Fossil Pushes Back Land-Animal Emergence



> Posted by: "bayouhalflings@aol.com" bayouhalflings@aol.com etherdomain

> A foot buried beneath Scottish soil for at least 345 million years pushes 
> back the timeline for the appearance of the first four-legged creatures 
> that spent their lives on dry land.

> "This is the earliest and smallest foot ever found with five digits," says 
> paleontologist Jennifer Clack of the University of Cambridge, England. "It 
> tells us that terrestrialization occurred much earlier than we had a hint 
> of before." Feet with five toes tend to be good at bearing weight and 
> rotating on land, she says.

> The specimen, 20 million years older than any known five-toed fossil, is 
> just 10 millimeters across and comes from an unknown species. It's one of a 
> slew of new finds described by Clack and colleagues online March 5 in the 
> Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. New caches unearthed near 
> rivers and coasts in Scotland and Canada are helping fill in a blank chapter 
> in the evolution of life on land.

> _http://ow.ly/9uoCd_ (http://ow.ly/9uoCd) 



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