One of the most impactful stories in evolution is getting a rewrite, thanks to the exciting discovery of the earliest known set of reptile footprints. Craig A. Eury and John Eason, two amateur paleontologists exploring the fossil-rich Snowy Plains Formation in Australia,

New discoveries of fossil clawed footprints from Australia, published in Nature, push the origin of reptiles back in time by at least 35 million years and change the entire timeline for the origin of tetrapods (backboned land animals).

Seventeen footprints preserved in a slab of sandstone discovered in southeastern Australia dating to about 355 million years ago are rewriting the history of the evolution of land vertebrates, showing that reptiles arose much earlier than previously known.