Rosa Rubicondior: Creationism Refuted - New Finding Shows That Reptiles Were Around At Least 350 million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Fossil tracks revise march of early life on Earth – News

In a paper that creationists will no doubt feel compelled to ignore, misrepresent, or dismiss, scientists report the discovery of reptile tracks in 350-million-year-old Australian rocks. This remarkable find pushes back the earliest known trace of reptiles by some 40 million years.

For mainstream science, this discovery provides further clarification of the timeline for the evolution of terrestrial tetrapods. However, for creationists—who continue to compress Earth's 3.8-billion-year history into a mere 6,000 to 10,000 years in order to preserve a literal interpretation of Genesis—it presents yet another challenge to their beliefs.

It is the kind of evidence that science routinely uncovers, forcing creationists into ever more creative contortions to avoid confronting the reality of evolution.

The discovery was made by Professor John Long of Flinders University and colleagues, who have detailed their findings and their significance in a Flinders University press release. Additionally, Professor Long, together with Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki and Professor Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University, Sweden, has published an open-access article discussing the research in The Conversation.

Their article in The Conversation is reproduced here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Published: May 14, 2025 4.01pm BST

Two lizard-like creatures crossed tracks 355 million years ago. Today, their footprints yield a major discovery

Marcin Ambrozik

John Long, Flinders University; Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki, Uppsala University, and Per Ahlberg, Uppsala University

The emergence of four-legged animals known as tetrapods was a key step in the evolution of many species today – including humans.

Our new discovery, published today in Nature, details ancient fossil footprints found in Australia that upend the early evolution timeline of all tetrapods. It also suggests major parts of the story could have played out in the southern supercontinent of Gondwana.

This fossil trackway whispers that we have been looking for the origin of modern tetrapods in the wrong time, and perhaps the wrong place.

The first feet on land

Tetrapods originated a long time ago in the Devonian period, when strange lobe-finned fishes began to haul themselves out of the water, probably around 390 million years ago.

This ancestral stock later split into two main evolutionary lines. One led to modern amphibians, such as frogs and salamanders. The other led to amniotes, whose eggs contain amniotic membranes protecting the developing foetus.

Today, amniotes include all reptiles, birds and mammals. They are by far the most successful tetrapod group, numbering more than 27,000 species of reptiles, birds and mammals.

They have occupied every environment on land, have conquered the air, and many returned to the water in spectacularly successful fashion. But the fossil record shows the earliest members of this amniote group were small and looked rather like lizards. How did they emerge?

The oldest known tetrapods have always been thought to be primitive fish-like forms like Acanthostega, barely capable of moving on land.

Acanthostega, an early tetrapod that lived about 365 million years ago, was a member of the ancestral stock that gave rise to amphibians and amniotes.

The authors

Most scientists agree amphibians and amniotes separated at the start of the Carboniferous period, about 355 million years ago. Later in the period, the amniote lineage split further into the ancestors of mammals and reptiles-plus-birds.

Now, this tidy picture falls apart.

A curious trackway

Key to our discovery is a 35 centimetre wide sandstone slab from Taungurung country, near Mansfield in eastern Victoria.

The slab is covered with the footprints of clawed feet that can only belong to early amniotes, most probably reptiles. It pushes back the origin of the amniotes by at least 35 million years.

Fossil trackways found near Mansfield in Victoria showing the oldest known reptile prints.

Mansfield slab, dated between 359-350 million years old, showing positions of early reptile tracks.

The authors

Despite huge variations in size and shape, all amniotes have certain features in common. For one, if we have limbs with fingers and toes, these are almost always tipped with claws – or nails, in the case of humans.

In other tetrapod groups, real claws don’t occur. Even claw-like, hardened toe tips seen in some amphibians are extremely rare.

Claws usually leave obvious marks in footprints, providing a clue to whether a fossil footprint was made by an amniote.

Close up showing the oldest known tracks with hooked claws from Mansfield, Victoria. Left, photo; right, optical scan.

The authors

The oldest clawed tracks

The previous oldest fossil record of reptiles is based on footprints and bones from North America and Europe around 318 million years ago.

The oldest record of reptile-like tracks in Europe is from Silesia in Poland, a new discovery also revealed in our paper. They are around 328 million years old.

However, the Australian slab is much older than that, dated to between 359 and 350 million years old. It comes from the earliest part of the Carboniferous rock outcropping along the Broken River (Berrepit in the Taungurung language of the local First Nations people).

This area has long been known for yielding many kinds of spectacular fossil fishes that lived in lakes and large rivers. Now, for the first time, we catch a glimpse of life on the riverbank.

The world oldest reptile came from outcrops of red sandstone in the Mansfield area, Victoria.

Fossil hunters search the Carboniferous red sandstone in the Mansfield area of Victoria. Such outcrops recently yielded the trackways of the world’s oldest reptile.

John Long

Two trackways of fossil footprints cross the slab’s upper surface, one of them overstepping an isolated footprint facing the opposite direction. The surface is covered with dimples made by raindrops, recording a brief shower just before the footprints were made. This proves the creatures were moving about on dry land.

All the footprints show claw marks, some in the form of long scratches where the foot has been dragged along.

The shape of the feet matches that of known early reptile tracks, so we are confident the footprints belong to an amniote. Our short animation below gives a reconstruction of the ancient environment around Mansfield 355 million years ago, and shows how the tracks were made.

A short animation showing the creature making the tracks and its scientific significance.

By Flinders University and Monkeystack Productions.

Rewriting the timeline

This find has a massive impact on the origin timeline of all tetrapods.

If amniotes had already evolved by the earliest Carboniferous, as our fossil shows, the last common ancestor of amniotes and amphibians has to lie much further back in time, in the Devonian period.

We can estimate the timing of the split by comparing the relative lengths of different branches in DNA-based family trees of living tetrapods. It suggests the split took place in the late Devonian, maybe as far back as 380 million years ago.

This implies the late Devonian world was populated not just by primitive fish-like tetrapods, and intermediate “fishapods” like the famous Tiktaalik, but also by advanced forms including close relatives of the living lineages. So why haven’t we found their bones?

The location of our slab provides a clue.

Big evolutionary questions

All other records of Carboniferous amniotes have come from the northern hemisphere ancient landmass called Euramerica that incorporated present-day North America and Europe. Euramerica also produced the great majority of Devonian tetrapod fossils.

The new Australian fossils come from Gondwana, a gigantic southern continent that also contained Africa, South America, Antarctica and India.

In all of this vast landmass, which stretched from the southern tropics down across the South Pole, our little slab is currently the only tetrapod fossil from the earliest part of the Carboniferous.

The Devonian record is scarcely much better. The Gondwana fossil record of early tetrapods is shockingly incomplete, with enormous gaps that could conceal – well, just about anything.

This find now raises a big evolutionary question. Did the first modern tetrapods, our own distant ancestors, emerge in the temperate Devonian landscapes of southern Gondwana, long before they spread to the sun-baked semi-deserts and steaming swamps of equatorial Euramerica?

It’s quite possible. Only more fieldwork, bringing to light new discoveries of Devonian and Carboniferous fossils from the old Gondwana continents, might one day answer that question.

We acknowledge the Taungurung people of Mansfield area where this scientific work has taken place.
John Long, Strategic Professor in Palaeontology, Flinders University; Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki, Lead Scientist, Mesozoic Ecosystems, Uppsala University, and Per Ahlberg, Professor of Evolutionary Organismal Biology, Uppsala University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

Abstract
The known fossil record of crown-group amniotes begins in the late Carboniferous with the sauropsid trackmaker Notalacerta^1,2 and the sauropsid body fossil Hylonomus^1,2,3,4. The earliest body fossils of crown-group tetrapods are mid-Carboniferous, and the oldest trackways are early Carboniferous^5,6,7. This suggests that the tetrapod crown group originated in the earliest Carboniferous (early Tournaisian), with the amniote crown group appearing in the early part of the late Carboniferous. Here we present new trackway data from Australia that challenge this widely accepted timeline. A track-bearing slab from the Snowy Plains Formation of Victoria, Taungurung Country, securely dated to the early Tournaisian^8,9, shows footprints from a crown-group amniote with clawed feet, most probably a primitive sauropsid. This pushes back the likely origin of crown-group amniotes by at least 35–40 million years. We also extend the range of Notalacerta into the early Carboniferous. The Australian tracks indicate that the amniote crown-group node cannot be much younger than the Devonian/Carboniferous boundary, and that the tetrapod crown-group node must be located deep within the Devonian; an estimate based on molecular-tree branch lengths suggests an approximate age of early Frasnian for the latter. The implications for the early evolution of tetrapods are profound; all stem-tetrapod and stem-amniote lineages must have originated during the Devonian. It seems that tetrapod evolution proceeded much faster, and the Devonian tetrapod record is much less complete, than has been thought.

Main
The origin of tetrapods, understood as an evolutionary and ecological phenomenon, was not a single event but a process that began with the acquisition of incipient terrestrial locomotory competence in the tetrapod stem group and ended with the emergence of the major crown-group clades, amphibians and amniotes. Of particular importance for the future development of the global ecosystem was the origin of amniotes, the only tetrapod clade to achieve complete reproductive independence of water, and by far the most impactful in terms of both diversity and disparity.

An overall understanding of this phase of vertebrate evolution requires data on phenotypic change, the timing of evolutionary and cladogenetic events, and patterns of diversity, disparity and biogeography. Three principal data sources are available: body fossils, ichnofossils (footprints and other traces) and time-calibrated molecular phylogenetic divergence dates. Body fossils and ichnofossils are typically preserved in different sedimentation regimes, and can thus capture animals with different environmental preferences, but both require taphonomic settings with net sediment deposition rather than erosion, and will thus be biased towards lowland environments, although some upland depositional settings are also known¹⁰. Molecular divergence dates are unaffected by depositional environments, but are themselves partly dependent on fossil calibration of the phylogeny. Furthermore, they can date only phylogenetic nodes uniting living lineages, such as the tetrapod crown-group node (uniting the lissamphibian and amniote lineages) and the amniote crown-group node (uniting the mammal and reptile–bird lineages). Fossils, by contrast, can illuminate the details of morphological evolution within stem groups.

Molecular divergence dates for the amniote crown-group node from 30 recent studies (Supplementary Information Part 1), curated at the TimeTree website (https://www.timetree.org), form a tight cluster with a median age of 319 million years, which corresponds to early Bashkirian (mid-Carboniferous); the spread of the cluster is 308.5 to 334.7 million years, thus spanning from Moscovian (late Carboniferous) to Viséan (early Carboniferous). The corresponding date cluster of 32 dates for the tetrapod crown-group node has a much wider spread, ranging from 333.3 to 395.0 million years (that is, from the Viséan to the Eifelian (Middle Devonian)); the median age in this case is 352 million years, or Tournaisian (earliest Carboniferous). The preponderance of molecular evidence thus suggests an origin of the tetrapod crown group during the earliest Carboniferous, with crown amniotes appearing some 30–35 million years later. This places these events in the aftermath of the end-Devonian mass extinction, during and after the 20-million-year interval of poor fossil record known as Romer’s gap¹¹. The published fossil record is compatible with this time frame, showing the earliest crown-group amniote body fossils and trackways (Hylonomus and Notalacerta) in the Bashkirian^1,2,3,4, the earliest crown-group tetrapod body fossils (for example, Balanerpeton) in the late Viséan^5,6, and the earliest crown-group tetrapod trackways (for example, Batrachichnus and Palaeosauropus) in the mid-Tournaisian⁷ (Fig. 1a). However, this compatibility partly reflects the calibration of the molecular trees by known fossils, and is thus not a fully independent verification.
Fig. 1: Existing state of knowledge and locality information.

a, Stratigraphic timescale representation of the known early fossil record of crown-group tetrapods. Thin grey lines indicate phylogenetic branches; thick grey lines indicate the body-fossil record from the earliest occurrence; arrowhead and name in black on the right margin indicate the name of the earliest body fossil; blue rectangles indicate the earliest ichnofossil record when this is earlier than the body-fossil record; the dashed line of grey rectangles indicates the range extension between the earliest body fossil and the earliest ichnofossil; name in blue on the right margin indicates the name of the earliest ichnorecord. The amniote crown-group node (1) and tetrapod crown-group node (2) are given minimum ages compatible with the fossil record. All dates are from https://stratigraphy.org/chart. Ma, million years ago. b, Map of Australia showing the locality (blue asterisk). NSW, New South Wales; NT, Northern Territory; QLD, Queensland; SA, South Australia; TAS, Tasmania; VIC, Victoria; WA, Western Australia. c, Stratigraphy of the Mansfield Group.

We present here new trackway evidence from Taungurung Country, Victoria, Australia (Figs. 1b,c and 2), indicating that these dates are substantially too late. Crown amniotes were already present in northeast Gondwana by the early Tournaisian. This in turn implies that the crown tetrapod node must lie deep in the Devonian. New trackway data from Silesia in Poland show that the earliest records of crown amniotes in the equatorial regions of Euramerica are also earlier than previously thought, Serpukhovian rather than Bashkirian.
Fig. 2: The Snowy Plains Formation trackway slab.

a, Photo of the slab, NMV P258240, as preserved. b, Same as in a, with footprints and trackways highlighted. Manus (front foot) prints are shown in yellow; pes (hind foot) prints are shown in blue. Am1–4, manus prints from trackway A; Ap1–4, pes prints from trackway A; Bm1–5, manus prints from trackway B; Bp1–4, pes prints from trackway B; Ip, isolated right pes print. c,d, Isolated right pes print Ip as a false-colour inverted scan image (c) and photo (d). e,f, Right manus print Am1 as a false-colour scan image (e) and photo (f). g, Photo of pes print Bp4 (above) and manus print Bm3 (below). In c–g, white arrows denote claw impressions or scratches, Roman numerals denote digit numbers. Scale bars, 50 mm (a) and 10 mm (c–g).

Fig. 3: Amniote footprints.

a–c, Three footprints of Notalacerta from the middle Serpukhovian to early Bashkirian Wałbrzych Formation of Silesia, Poland; each is shown as an optical scan (top) and photo (bottom). Holy Cross Branch of the Polish Geological Institute – National Research Institute in Kielce, Muz. PGI-OS 220/182 (a), 184 (b) and 185 (c). d, Isolated left pes print Ip from the Snowy Plains Formation slab NMV P258240 (Fig. 2c,d), reproduced here to facilitate comparison with other amniote footprints. e–g, Presumed sauropsid prints, manus (top) and pes (bottom), of Notalacerta (e), Varanopus (f) and Dromopus (g), all from ref. ². h, Dimetropus manus or pes imprint, natural cast, IGWU-1, Geological Museum of the Institute of Geological Sciences, University of Wrocław, Wrocław. Labelling as in Fig. 2. Scale bars, 10 mm. Photos in e–g reproduced from ref. ², Frontiers Media, under a Creative Commons licence CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Fig. 4: Revised timescale of early tetrapod evolution.

Stratigraphic timescale representation of the Devonian and Carboniferous, showing the impact of the Snowy Plains Formation sauropsid tracks. The track record is shown as a pink rectangle, of double height to indicate possible age range. Other graphic conventions as in Fig. 1. The amniote crown-group node (1) and lungfish–tetrapod node (3) are given minimum ages compatible with the fossil record. The tetrapod crown-group node (2) is positioned in accordance with the branch-length proportions derived from TimeTree (https://www.timetree.org) as explained in the text; vertical blurring of the horizontal branch segment indicates that this date is uncertain and should be considered only as a general indicator, not a precise estimate.

By devoting their efforts to avoiding scientific understanding and dismissing any evidence that challenges their beliefs, creationists maintain a simplistic, child-like, and magical view of the world. In doing so, they entirely miss the true significance of the natural world and fail to appreciate how natural forces, acting over deep time, have shaped the planet we inhabit and the life with which we share it.

The real tragedy of religious fundamentalism lies in its portrayal of ignorance as an achievement, and the wilful maintenance of that ignorance as a virtuous struggle against the supposed evils of science—a science that merely seeks to reveal the truth. Ironically, this is the very truth they claim was created by their chosen deity for humanity’s benefit.

Discoveries like these not only illuminate the intricate history of life on Earth but also serve as a reminder that understanding our planet through the lens of evidence and reason is far more enriching than clinging to comforting myths at the expense of reality.

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