The fossilized trail of an aquatic creature suggests that animals walked using legs at least 30 million years earlier than had been thought. The tracks -- two parallel rows of small dots, each about 2 millimeters in diameter -- date back some 570 million years, to the Ediacaran period.
© Kevin Fitzsimons, Ohio State UniversityTrackway of one of the earliest animals, a multi-legged creature that walked over the bed of an ancient sea once covering Nevada. The animal left behind a pair of parallel impressions - small, round dots in the silt that later became rock.
The Ediacaran preceded the Cambrian period, the time when most major groups of animals first evolved.
Scientists once thought that it was primarily microbes and simple multicellular animals that existed prior to the Cambrian, but that notion is changing, explained Loren Babcock, professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University.
"We keep talking about the possibility of more complex animals in the Ediacaran -- soft corals, some arthropods, and flatworms -- but the evidence has not been totally convincing," he said. "But if you find evidence, like we did, of an animal with legs -- an animal walking around -- then that makes the possibility much more likely."
Comment: A 12 hour warning is not exactly reassuring, is it? Research collected on this site has shown that the killer space debris, when they come, will likely be comet fragments rather than asteroids. Comet fragments have the bad habit of travelling in large clusters and have been shown to hit the Earth much more frequently than admitted by mainstream science.