Oldest Known Footprints in Grand Canyon Were Left by Mysterious, Sideways-Walking Reptile
Oldest Known Footprints in Grand Canyon Were Left by Mysterious, Sideways-Walking Reptile
By Laura Geggel, Senior Writer | November 15, 2018 08:02am ET
About 315 million years ago — long before dinosaurs roamed the Earth — an early reptile scuttled along in a strangely sideways jaunt, leaving its tiny footprints embedded in the landscape, new research finds.
It's anyone's guess why this ancient, clawed critter walked sideways (although experts have several ideas), but one thing is certain: The animal's prints represent the oldest-known vertebrate track marks ever discovered in Grand Canyon National Park, said Stephen Rowland, a professor of geology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who is studying the fossilized trackway.
The trackway is so old, that it was made a mere 5 million years after the first known reptiles emerged on Earth, just as the ancient supercontinent Pangaea was forming. "This is right in that little window of the very first reptiles," Rowland told Live Science. "We don't know much about that real early history." [Photos: Dinosaur Tracks Reveal Australia's 'Jurassic Park']
The research, which has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, was presented at the annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Oct. 17.
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https://www.livescience.com/64097-oldest-vertebrate-footprints-grand-canyon.html?utm_source=ls-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20181116-ls
= new reply since forum marked as read
was it just one set of tracks? Were there lots of them so that this can be thought of as a regular behavior? If not, maybe it was just trying to get away from something or stepping over something... who really knows?
