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Bilaterian animals such as arthropods and annelids have paired appendages and are among the most diverse animals today and in the geological past. They are often assumed to have appeared and radiated suddenly during the "Cambrian Explosion" about 541-510 million years ago, although it has long been suspected that their evolutionary ancestry was rooted in the Ediacaran Period. Until the current discovery, however, no fossil record of animal appendages had been found in the Ediacaran Period.Researchers from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Virginia Tech in the United States studied trackways and...

Yang Zheyu, a 6-year-old kindergarten student in Chengdu, Sichuan province, is a celebrity. In his English and painting classes outside his kindergarten, strangers recognise him. When he walks through the residential quarter where he and his parents live, neighbors ask for his autograph. That's because the media have hailed him as the country's youngest discoverer of dinosaur footprints. Zheyu, who was born in December 2014, visited his maternal grandfather's home in Tongjiang county with his parents during the seven-day National Day holiday last year to see "strange footprints". His grandfather, Gou Taixiang, 56, a doctor, had told Zheyu that footprints...

After more than a decade of searching for evidence of the infamous British Bigfoot, an investigator claims to have found a print that was a terrifying 41cm from toe to heelAn investigator claims to have proof of the British Bigfoot. Lee Brickley found tracks and claw marks after a decade searching for the ape-like beast. The 33-year-old says the print was a terrifying 41cm from toe to heel – nearly twice the size of a man’s size eight. Lee knows people will think he is “mad” but he hopes to prove them wrong. He said: “When I show them the...

The earliest human footprint on record in the Americas wasn't found in Canada, the United States or even Mexico; it was found much farther south, in Chile, and it dates to an astonishing 15,600 years ago, a new study finds. The finding sheds light on when humans first reached the Americas, likely by traveling across the Bering Strait land bridge in the midst of the last ice age. This 10.2-inch-long (26 centimeters) print might even be evidence of pre-Clovis people in South America, the group that came before the Clovis, which are known for their distinctive spearheads, the researchers said.

(Parks Victoria released a photo on December 20, which shows a dinosaur footprint after it was damaged by vandals at Flat Rocks near Melbourne) Vandals used a hammer to smash a 115-million-year-old three-toed dinosaur footprint in a national park in Australia. Park rangers at the Bunurong Marine Park discovered the damage to the theropod footprint while taking a school group on a tour. The one-foot wide print was found in 2006 and deliberately left in place to allow visitors to see it in its natural state in one of the world’s few ice-age dinosaur sites. "It is so disappointing,”...

group of scientists say they have discovered “Australia’s Jurassic Park” along the rocky shores of Kimberly, a remote region in Western Australia. As Jonathan Amos reports for the BBC, palaeontologists found a diverse collection of dinosaur footprints in the area—among them the largest dinosaur footprint known to science. The research team, which was comprised of palaeontologists from the University of Queensland and James Cook University, recorded twenty-one types of fossil footprints stamped into the sandstones of the Dampier Peninsula. They recently published their findings in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. “There were five different types of predatory dinosaur tracks, at...

Nowhere gets you closer to the Romans on Hadrian's Wall than the fort and settlement of Vindolanda, the extraordinary hoard of personal artefacts gives you a unique insight into the lives of people living here 2000 years ago. The latest addition to the collection of artefacts from the current excavation has certainly made an impression on everyone. Someone 2000 years ago quite literally put their foot in it and as a result a volunteer digging at the site has unearthed a tile with a clear imprint of a human foot that accidentally, or perhaps mischievously stood on the freshly made...

Bronze Age footprints, both from animals and from humans, were initially identified as work was conducted on the Diramazione Nocera-Cava dei Tirreni methane pipeline in the municipalities of Nocera Superiore, Nocera Inferiore, Roccapiemonte, and Castel San Giorgio. This prompted a two-year-long archaeological investigation.SoGEarch, an Italian archaeological society, oversaw the excavations through the Superintendence of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the provinces of Salerno and Avellino.The footprints found near the Casarzano stream in Salerno, roughly 20 miles away from Pompeii, contained rock fragments from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Experts believe the people who left behind these prints were trying...

researchers have uncovered a series of massive dinosaur trackways dating back to the Middle Jurassic Period, approximately 166 million years ago. Dubbed a 'dinosaur highway,' the site features footprints from both herbivorous dinosaurs, likely Cetiosaurus and the fearsome carnivore Megalosaurus. The discovery was made at Dewars Farm Quarry in Oxfordshire, England, and includes over 200 footprints spread across five extensive trackways, the longest of which stretches more than 150 meters. ... a skeleton is a record of the animal once it's died. Footprints are quite different in that they are snapshots into the life of an animal .... The overlapping...

More than 1.5 million years ago, two different species of ancient human crossed paths on a lakeshore, perhaps locking eyes with each other. These early forerunners of Homo sapiens wandered in a landscape teeming with wildlife, including giant maribou storks that stood 2 meters (6.5 feet) tall...The first part of the find occurred in July 2021 during an excavation at Koobi Fora, on the eastern shore of Lake Turkana in Kenya, where the skeletal remains of several ancient human relatives have been found. That excavation revealed one hominin footprint, alongside several other tracks made by large birds. The team decided...

A group of scientists, led by paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, an Emeritus Professor President of the Institute for the Study of Earth and Man at the Southern Methodist University Campus in Dallas, Texas, have made a significant discovery. The scientists found matching dinosaur footprints on two separate continents, South America and Africa. In Brazil and Cameroon, over 260 footprints were uncovered. These footprints show where dinosaurs once roamed freely on the two continents millions of years ago before South America and Africa drifted apart. Jacobs explained that the footprints were not only similar in age but also in their geological...

In 2022, researchers stumbled upon the footprint site near the northern tip of North Africa while examining boulders at a nearby pocket beach. A team of archaeologists have unveiled the discovery of the oldest human footprints ever recorded in North Africa and the southern Mediterranean. The footprints, dating back an astonishing 90,000 years, were found on a beach in Larache, Morocco, by a multinational team led by Moncef Essedrati, a research professor and laboratory director at the French University of Southern Brittany. "Between tides, I said to my team that we should go north to explore another beach," Essedrati told...

A new analysis of ancient footprints in South Africa suggests that the humans who made these tracks might have been wearing hard-soled sandals.Ichnological evidence from three palaeosurfaces on the Cape Coast, in conjunction with neoichnological study, suggests that humans may indeed have worn footwear while traversing dune surfaces during the Middle Stone Age.The study is published in the journal Ichnos.While researchers are reluctant to shoehorn in any firm conclusions regarding the use of footwear in the distant past, the prints' unusual characteristics may provide the oldest evidence yet that people used shoes to protect their feet from sharp rocks in...

...an international research team led by scientists from the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment presents the earliest human footprints known from Germany. The tracks were discovered in the roughly 300,000-year-old Schöningen Paleolithic site complex in Lower Saxony. The footprints, presumably from Homo heidelbergensis, are surrounded by several animal tracks—collectively, they present a picture of the ecosystem at that time.In an open birch and pine forest with an understory of grasses sits a lake, a few kilometers long and several hundred meters wide. On its muddy shores, herds of elephants, rhinoceroses, and even-toed ungulates...

Thousands of years ago, a swath of land along what is now the western coast of England served as a superhighway for humans and animals alike. Today, the ebb and flow of each passing tide reveals more of the ancient footprints that these long-gone travelers stamped into the once mud-caked route.Reminders of their travels can be seen along a nearly 2-mile-long (3 kilometers) stretch of coastline near Formby, England. The footprint beds show how, as glaciers melted and sea levels rose after the last ice age ended around 11,700 years ago, humans and animals were forced inland, thus forming a...

(R. Nial Bradshaw) Archaeologists recently stumbled upon a set of mysterious 'ghost footprints' in the salt flats of a Utah desert. These unusual ancient tracks get their eerie name not because they are from an ethereal realm, but due to their earthly composition: They become visible only after it rains and the footprints fill with moisture and become darker in color, before disappearing again after they dry out in the sun. Researchers accidentally discovered the unusual impressions in early July as they drove to another nearby archaeological site at Hill Air Force Base in Utah's Great Salt Lake Desert. The...

Researchers excavated human footprints out of a small bluff next to a dried-up playa lake and radiocarbon-dated embedded seeds to around 23,000 years ago. Their results suggest that people entered the Americas thousands of years earlier than the accepted estimate....some of these prints could be tens of thousands of years old, making them potentially the best evidence yet that people reached the Americas far earlier than once believed. Radiocarbon dating of seeds surrounding the prints suggests that they were made during the Last Glacial Maximum, when massive ice sheets are thought to have blocked any passage from the Bering Land...

Palaeontologists are claiming Utah officials have driven over a precious fossil site after dismantling a boardwalk nearby, possibly irreparably damaging preserved dinosaur footprints and animal tracks. These ancient remnants are extremely delicate and cannot be easily seen, according to sources speaking to Gizmodo, but contain more than 200 dinosaur tracks left by 10 distinct species. The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) has since filed a cease-and-desist letter against the US Bureau of Land Management Utah office, calling for the immediate halt of the destruction of Mill Canyon Dinosaur Tracksite near Moab. The alleged destruction comes as a result of the...

Footprints on the Ciampate del Diavolo. (edmondo gnerre/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.0) ============================================================================================= According to legend, the devil once took a walk down the side of a volcano in southern Italy, each step preserved forever in solid rock. The tracks are known as the "Ciampate del Diavolo"' or "Devil's Trail" – but details published in 2020 reveal a less diabolical yet far more interesting story on how they came to be. The mysterious footprints are well known to those living near Roccamonfina, an extinct volcano in southern Italy that hasn't erupted in tens of thousands of years. Since 2001, researchers have...

We present an updated time frame for the 30 m thick late Miocene sedimentary Trachilos section from the island of Crete that contains the potentially oldest hominin footprints. The section is characterized by normal magnetic polarity. New and published foraminifera biostratigraphy results suggest an age of the section within the Mediterranean biozone MMi13d, younger than ~ 6.4 Ma. Calcareous nannoplankton data from sediments exposed near Trachilos and belonging to the same sub-basin indicate deposition during calcareous nannofossil biozone CN9bB, between 6.023 and 6.727 Ma. By integrating the magneto- and biostratigraphic data we correlate the Trachilos section with normal polarity Chron...