I wonder what the anti-darwinists think of this? They've been quiet lately. I guess they've been busy attacking global warming. Scientists believe that human life first originated in the water and migrated to land.
Rocks from a disused quarry record the "footprints" of unknown creatures that lived about 397 million years ago.
Scientists tell the journal Nature that the fossil trackways even retain the impressions left by the "toes" on the animals' feet.
The team says the find means that land vertebrates appeared millions of years earlier than previously supposed.
"This place has yielded what I consider to be some of the most exciting fossils I've ever encountered in my career as a palaeontologist," said team member Per Ahlberg from Uppsala University, Sweden.
"[They are] fossil of footprints that give us the earliest record of how our very distant ancestors moved out of the water and moved on to the land and took their first steps."
Numerous trackways have been identified in the Zachelmie Quarry in the Holy Cross Mountains.
They represent the movements of many animals as they scurried around what would have been a tropical muddy shoreline in the Middle Devonian Period of Earth history.
Slabs of carbonate rock are dappled with prints that range in size and detail.
Some indentations are obscured where successive animals have trampled over the same patch of ground; but others retain exquisite features of the pads and digits that made them.
The animals were probably crocodile-like in appearance and lived an amphibian-like existence (although those specific animal forms did not appear until many millions of years later).
The dimensions of the prints suggest some individuals were more than two metres long.
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