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Reptiles appeared 40 million years earlier than previously thought

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May 15, 2025
3 min read

Reptiles appeared 40 million years earlier than previously thought

Reptiles appeared on Earth up to 40 million years earlier than previously thought. This has been shown thanks to evidence at an Australian fossil site that shows a critical time period.

Flinders University Professor John Long and colleagues identified fossilised tracks showing an amniote with clawed feet, most likely a type of reptile, that dates back to the Carboniferous period, 350 million years ago.

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“Once we identified this, we realised this is the oldest evidence in the world of reptile-like animals walking around on land, and it pushes their evolution back by 35-to-40 million years older than the previous records in the Northern Hemisphere,” Professor Long, Strategic Professor in Palaeontology at Flinders said.

Published in the journal Nature, the discovery indicates that these animals originated in the ancient southern supercontinent, Gondwana, that formed after the breakup of Pangea. What is now Australia was a central part of the supercontinent.

The fossil tracks, found in the Mansfield district of northern Victoria in Australia, were likely laid by an animal that, according to Professor Long, would have resembled a small, stumpu, Goanna-like animal.

“The implications of this discovery for the early evolution of tetrapods are profound,” says Professor Long. “All stem-tetrapod and stem-amniote lineages must have originated during the Devonian period, but tetrapod evolution proceeded much faster, and the Devonian tetrapod record is much less complete than we have believed.”

Fossils of crown-group amniotes, the group that includes mammals, birds, and reptiles, date back to the late Carboniferous period, 318 million years ago. The earliest body fossils of this group were dated back 334 million years ago, and the earliest trackways were around 353 million years old.

“We now present new trackway data from Australia that falsify this widely accepted timeline,” says Professor Long, who worked with Australian and international experts on the major Nature journal paper.

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