Remarkable fossils rewrite the story of how animals conquered the land
Key takeaways
- Palaeontologists have found new evidence that the early ancestors of amphibians, reptiles and mammals did not have a larval stage with external gills like modern frogs or salamanders
- Today’s reptiles, birds, mammals and amphibians belong to a group called tetrapods, which evolved from lobe-finned fish around 390 million years ago.
- Pardo and his colleague Arjan Mann, also at the Field Museum, examined a collection of fossils that were unearthed between the 1960s and 1990s at the Mazon Creek fossil site, south-west of Chicago.
Why this matters: new research or scientific developments with potential real-world impact.
Palaeontologists have found new evidence that the early ancestors of amphibians, reptiles and mammals did not have a larval stage with external gills like modern frogs or salamanders
Twitter / X icon Linkedin Reddit Email. A fossil baby embolomere from Mazon Creek, Illinois. A set of exquisitely preserved 300-million-year-old fossils suggests that early four-limbed vertebrates did not undergo a metamorphosis between their juvenile and adult stages, challenging conventional ideas about the evolution of life on land.
“We have for a very long time assumed that these animals were broadly amphibian-like, and that this life cycle would have bridged the gap between life in the water and life on land,” says Jason Pardo at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.