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Witness History, Witness History, Finding the longest set of footprints left by the first vertebrate

Witness History

Witness History

Finding the longest set of footprints left by the first vertebrate

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March 12, 2024

10 minutes

Available for over a year

In 1992 off the coast of Ireland, a Swiss geology student accidentally discovered the longest set of footprints made by the first four-legged animals to walk on earth.

They pointed to a new date for the key milestone in evolution when the first amphibians left the water 385 million years ago. The salamander-type animal which was the size of a basset hound lived when County Kerry was semi-arid, long before dinosaurs, as Iwan Stössel explains to Josephine McDermott.

(Picture: Artwork of a primitive tetrapod. Credit: Christian Jegou/Science Photo Library)