Scientists find oldest footprints on Earth

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Researchers have found what are believed to be the oldest footprints on Earth dating back 570 million years.

This pre-dates the period boffins thought creatures first started using legs by 30 million years - when was the last time you got something wrong at work by 30 million years?

The tracks - found in what was once a shallow sea in Nevada - form two parallel rows of tiny dots, each about 2 millimeters in diameter.

The unknown creature is believed to have had a centimeter-wide body and walked on many spindly legs like an centipede or leg-bearing worm.

It is thought to even pre-date the creature at the end of the Guinness Evolution advert.

Loren Babcock, professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University says he found the footprints by accident while surveying rocks in the mountains near Goldfield, Nevada.

"This was truly an accidental discovery. We came on an outcrop that looked like it crossed the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary, so we stopped to take a look at it, he said.

"We just sat down and started flipping rocks over. We were there less than an hour when I saw it."

At approximately 570 million years old, this new fossil not only provides the earliest suggestion of animals walking on legs, but it also shows that complex animals were alive on earth before the Cambrian.

Not many macroscopic fossils exist from that time because soft-bodied creatures are not normally preserved.

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