A reconstruction of Tyrannoroter heberti, eating a fern.
Illustration by Hannah Fredd.
We have another example today of how the evidence written into the fossil record — which creationists insist either does not exist, or is at best a lie forged to deceive us — stubbornly refuses to conform to creationist requirements. Instead, it continues to tell the only story it can: of life evolving slowly over deep time on a planet that is billions of years old.
The latest example comes from a paper published in Nature Ecology and Evolution by researchers from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and the Smithsonian Museum. The study was co-led by Arjan Mann, assistant curator of fossil fishes and early tetrapods at the Field Museum.
The paper presents evidence of the earliest known herbivorous vertebrate — dating to some 307 million years before creationists believe the Earth was created. Once again, this highlights the fundamental problem creationists face when they begin with a dogmatic belief that the Earth is only a few thousand years old because a handful of Bronze Age pastoralists said so. Having declared in advance that there has been no significant evolution, only minor variation within “kinds”, they are then forced to twist and contort the real-world evidence in a futile attempt to shoehorn it into their absurdly compressed timescale.
The animal, named Tyrannoroter heberti by the researchers, evolved over the tens of millions of years since the first vertebrates transitioned from lobe-finned fish to terrestrial tetrapods around 375 million years ago — perhaps to escape aquatic predators, or to exploit the invertebrate prey that had already colonised the land. Plants, meanwhile, which had begun spreading onto land some 475 million years ago, had also been evolving, and by this time were well established as ferns, horsetails, and other tough early vegetation.
Tyrannoroter heberti, known so far from a single skull, was probably among the largest terrestrial animals alive at the time, reaching around a foot in length — roughly the size of an American football — based on the proportions of close relatives. The fossil was recovered from shoreline cliffs in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada.
It is thought to represent a stem amniote: part of the lineage of vertebrates that evolved the ability to lay eggs away from water, unlike amphibians which must still return to water to reproduce. This group ultimately gave rise to reptiles, birds, and mammals — in other words, to almost the entire later terrestrial vertebrate world, including ourselves.
The Evolutionary Revolution of Herbivory. One of the most profound transitions in the history of life on land was not simply the move of vertebrates from water onto dry ground, but the later shift from eating animals to eating plants. The discovery of Tyrannoroter heberti as the earliest known herbivorous vertebrate highlights just how transformative this change was.The background to this discovery is explained in a Field Museum news item.
Why herbivory matters
Plants are not passive food. Unlike animal prey, vegetation is tough, fibrous, and chemically defended. The evolution of herbivory required a whole suite of adaptations, including:
- Specialised teeth and jaws for cropping and grinding plant material rather than seizing prey.
- Larger digestive systems capable of processing cellulose-rich tissues.
- Symbiotic gut microbes to break down plant cell walls — an evolutionary partnership still essential in modern herbivores.
In other words, herbivory is not a trivial dietary preference: it is an evolutionary innovation that reshaped terrestrial ecosystems.
The Carboniferous world: forests before dinosaurs
By the late Carboniferous, around 300 million years ago, the land was already covered in dense swampy forests of giant clubmosses, horsetails, seed ferns, and early conifers. Insects and other arthropods had diversified enormously, and vertebrates were beginning to radiate into new ecological roles.
Until this point, most early tetrapods were carnivores or insect-eaters. The appearance of an herbivorous vertebrate marks the opening of an entirely new niche: animals feeding directly on the vast plant biomass now available on land.
Herbivores change everything
Once vertebrates began eating plants, the consequences were dramatic:
- Food chains expanded, supporting larger and more complex ecosystems.
- Herbivores became prey for larger predators, driving evolutionary arms races.
- Plant–animal interactions intensified, influencing plant defences and diversification.
This was the beginning of the long evolutionary pathway that would eventually lead to later herbivorous reptiles, dinosaurs, mammals, and ultimately the grazing ecosystems of today.
Why this is a problem for creationism
Creationism requires fully formed ecosystems to appear suddenly within a few thousand years. But fossils like Tyrannoroter show the opposite: stepwise ecological innovation unfolding over immense spans of time, with herbivory emerging only after plants, soils, forests, and terrestrial food webs had already been evolving for hundreds of millions of years.
The fossil record is not the signature of instantaneous creation — it is the documentary evidence of gradual evolutionary change written across deep time.
Football-sized fossil creature may have been one of the first land animals to eat its veggies
The “tyrant digger’s” tough teeth—including ones on the roof its mouth—reveal the evolutionary history of plant-eating
Life on Earth started in the oceans. Sometime around 475 million years ago, plants began making their way from the water onto the land, and it took another 100 million years for the first animals with backbones to join them. But for tens of millions of years, these early land-dwelling creatures only ate their fellow animals, rather than grazing on greenery. In a new paper in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, scientists describe the 307-million-year-old fossil of one of the earliest known land vertebrates that evolved the ability to eat plants.
Arjan Mann with a 3D-printed replica of Tyrannoroter’s skull in the Carboniferous coal forest display at Chicago’s Field Museum.
© Field Museum.
This is one of the oldest known four-legged animals to eat its veggies. It shows that experimentation with herbivory goes all the way back to the earliest terrestrial tetrapods—the ancient relatives of all land vertebrates, including us.
Arjan Mann, co-lead author
Negaunee Integrative Research Center
Field Museum of Natural History
Chicago, IL, USA.
The specimen is the first of its group to receive a detailed 3D reconstruction, which allowed us to look inside its skull and reveal its specialized teeth, helping us to trace the origin of terrestrial herbivory.
Zifang Xiong, co=lead author
Department of Earth Sciences
Carleton University
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
The researchers named the new species Tyrannoroter heberti, meaning Hebert’s tyrant digger, in honor of its discoverer, Brian Hebert. The animal’s skull is the only part that scientists have found, but based on the size of its head and the more complete skeletons of its relatives, Tyrannoroter was probably a stocky four-legged creature about a foot long. “It was roughly the size and shape of an American football,” says Mann. By modern standards, that’s not terribly large, but it was one of the largest land-dwelling animals of its time. Tyrannoroter probably looked a little like a lizard, but it lived before the ancestors of reptiles and mammals split off from each other, so it technically wasn’t a reptile.
The team found Tyrannoroter on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, under harsh fieldwork conditions.
Nova Scotia has the highest tides in the world—when we’re working there, we’re racing against the tide, when the ocean comes back in. It’s very rocky, and the fossils are in cliffs on the shore. Paleontologists hate excavating in cliffs, because the cliff could come down on you.
Arjan Mann.
Brian Hebert, an avocational paleontologist from Nova Scotia, discovered the small skull in a fossilized tree stump during a field season led by Hillary Maddin, a professor of paleontology at Carleton University.The skull was wide and heart-shaped, really narrow at the snout but really wide at the back,” says Mann. “Within five seconds of looking at it, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s a pantylid microsaur.’
Arjan Mann.
The pantylids are a fairly early chapter in the story of vertebrate animals living on land. When lobe-finned fish first evolved limbs that let them scoot onto the land, they still depended largely on their watery homes.
The pantylids are from the second phase of terrestriality, when animals became permanently adapted to life on dry land.
Arjan Mann.
They're what scientists call stem amniotes—animals closely related to the group of tetrapods that evolved eggs that could stay dry outside of water. In later years, these stem amniotes would split into reptiles and the early ancestors of mammals.
Mann prepared the specimen by carefully chipping away rock from the fossilized bone, but the skull had fossilized with its mouth closed, and internal structures like its brain case remained hidden. To see inside the skull, the researchers CT scanned it, producing a series of stackable X-ray images to generate a 3D picture.
We were most excited to see what was hidden inside the mouth of this animal once it was scanned—a mouth jam-packed with a whole additional set of teeth for crushing and grinding food, like plants.
Hillary C. Maddin, senior author.
Department of Earth Sciences
Carleton University
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
These teeth, including ones on the roof of its mouth, hint that our stem amniote tetrapod relatives were eating plants sooner than scientists had previously thought.Tyrannoroter heberti is of great interest because it was long thought that herbivory was restricted to amniotes. It is a stem amniote but has a specialized dentition that could be used for processing plant fodder.
Hans-Dieter Sues, co-author
Department of Paleobiology
National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution
Washington, DC, USA.
That’s not to say that Tyrannoroter ate only plants.When Hans Sues was my advisor during my post-doctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian, he would always say that just about all herbivores alive today consume at least some animal protein, and that herbivory is best seen as a gradient.
Arjan Mann.
Tyrannoroter probably ate smaller animals, including insects, in addition to vegetation, and the insect exoskeletons in early tetrapods’ diets may have paved the way for stem amniotes like Tyrannoroter to be able to crush and process tough plant materials. What’s more, digesting the bodies of plant-eating insects may have given early tetrapods the gut flora and microbes they would need to process plants.
In addition to shedding light on the origins of herbivory, the research could also provide insights into what happens when plant-eating animals are faced with the destruction of those plants. Tyrannoroter lived near the end of the Carboniferous Period, when the planet underwent a period of climate change, the last icehouse-to-greenhouse transition since the one we’re currently in.
At the end of the Carboniferous, the rainforest ecosystems collapsed, and we had a period of global warming. The lineage of animals that Tyrannoroter belongs to didn’t do very well. This could be a data point in the bigger picture of what happens to plant-eating animals when climate change rapidly alters their ecosystems and the plants that can grow there.
Arjan Mann.
Publication:
Discoveries like Tyrannoroter heberti are not awkward anomalies that evolution must somehow explain away — they are precisely the kinds of transitional ecological steps that evolutionary theory predicts. Once plants had colonised the land, and once vertebrates had made the long transition from fins to limbs and from water to air, it was inevitable that some lineages would begin exploiting the vast new resource that terrestrial vegetation represented. Herbivory was not a sudden miracle; it was an evolutionary innovation, emerging gradually as anatomy, digestion, and ecological opportunity aligned over millions of years.
And this is exactly what makes such fossils so devastating for creationism. A world only a few thousand years old has no room for the slow assembly of complex ecosystems, no time for forests to spread, soils to form, food webs to diversify, and entirely new modes of life — such as vertebrate herbivory — to evolve step by step. Creationists are left with nothing but the familiar choices: deny the evidence, distort the timescale, or insist that a deity deliberately planted an elaborate false history in the rocks, despite the claim in their supposedly inerrant holy book that their god can't lie (Titus 1:2, Hebrews 6:18, and Numbers 23:19).
But the fossil record is not a theological puzzle. It is a cumulative archive of life’s history, and it tells the same story on every continent and in every geological period: of gradual change, branching descent, innovation, extinction, and adaptation across spans of time so vast that the human mind struggles to comprehend them.
Far from supporting the idea of sudden creation, fossils like Tyrannoroter show evolution doing exactly what it has always done — filling new niches, reshaping ecosystems, and leaving behind an unmistakable trail of evidence that no amount of dogma can erase.
The rocks, as always, tell the truth — whether creationists like it or not.
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