Our new discovery, published today in Nature, details ancient fossil footprints found in Australia that upend the early ...

Tracks found in early Carboniferous-period rocks in southeast Australia appear to be from an amniote, most likely a reptile. If so, these beat the previous oldest evidence for amniotes by more than 30 ...

Amniotes are thought to have diverged from amphibians at the dawn of the Carboniferous period, about 355 million years ago. Mammals would diverge from reptiles and birds only 30 million years later.

Early amniotes evolved to lay eggs on land, because they were encased in an amniotic membrane that stopped them drying out. ... Canada, and were dated to the mid-Carboniferous period, ...

If amniotes had already evolved by the earliest Carboniferous, as our fossil shows, the last common ancestor of amniotes and amphibians has to lie much further back in time, in the Devonian period.

Over 750,000 square kilometres of Amazon rainforest have been cleared since 1970 – a fifth of the total. As a result, many of the animals that live there are threatened with extinction.But this isn’t ...

Carboniferous Swamp Characteristic of the Carboniferous period (from about 360 million to 300 million years ago) were its dense and swampy forests, which gave rise to large deposits of peat. Over ...

A near-complete fossil skeleton of an ancient reptile dates to 300 million years ago. It had a blunt skull for tunneling underground, and special scales may have helped it slither through dirt.

Fossilized tracks in Australia reveal amniotes evolved 35-40 million years earlier than thought, pushing tetrapod origins back to the Devonian period.