Reptiles have been around a little longer than we thought, a stunning fossil find reveals. Footprints found in New Brunswick, Canada push back the date of the first reptiles, which evolved around 315 million years ago. “The evolution of reptiles was one of the most important events in the whole history of life,” said the fossil's finder Dr Howard Falcon-Lang, a paelontologist at the University of Bristol (BBC, Times).

Previously the oldest evidence of reptiles was fossils found in 1859. The new footprints were found in the same region as the previous fossils but about a kilometre lower in the rock strata, meaning they are between one and three million years older. The findings are reported in the Journal of the Geological Society. “There were only a few species capable of making prints like this around at the time so we came up with a short-list of suspects. However, the prints showed that the hands had five fingers and scales, sure evidence they were made by reptiles and not amphibians,” said one of Falcon-Lang's co-authors on the paper Mike Benton (press release).

In a strangely similar story researchers working in Germany are claiming to have found the oldest footprints positively identified, after fossils of two ‘reptile-like' animals from 290 million years ago were matched to fossil tracks (Live Science). Their results are published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Image: Howard Falcon-Lang

It looks like Homo sapiens headed to the beach and engaged in ‘modern behaviours' such as eating seafood, making delicate knives, and grinding up shells to make paints some 40,000 years earlier than previously known (there's a host of stories on this today, see for example the New York Times and BBC).

The earliest previous evidence for human use of marine resources was dated to around 125,000 years ago (followed by evidence of Neanderthals cooking shellfish in Italy about 110,000 years ago). Now Curtis Marean and colleagues report in Nature findings from a sea cave in South Africa suggesting people were living on the coast there around 164,000 years ago (Nature paper subscription needed; press release). The authors propose these coast-dwellers may have been driven to seafood to survive a cool, dry spell that turned most of Africa to desert.

I have always thought that coastal living was one of the easier ways of life – with plentiful food, water, and a more moderate climate – so had assumed that early peoples would have flocked to the shore. But apparently the prevailing wisdom is that the earliest modern humans (some 150,000 to 200,000 years ago) preferred hunting inland game. “Shellfish was one of the last additions to the human diet before domesticated plants and animals were introduced,” team leader Marean (sadly pronounced 'mar-e-an' rather than ‘marine') told the NY Times.

The African press doesn't seem to have done much with the story, though Reuters Africa reports: For early humans, a beach party and clam bake in S.Africa.