Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin confirmed in a new scientific study that fossil remains were found in Scotland for a kind of extinct insect that lived 425 million years ago, dating back to the oldest animal on land in history.
The fossil specimen belongs to a species of extinct insect called Kampecaris obanensis, similar to a thousand feet of worms. It is 1.5 centimeters long and was discovered since 1899, but the researchers in this new study dated the history of the discovery accurately.
The first wild creatures
According to the new study, published in the journal "Historical biological" last May, the fossil organism represents the oldest known wild animal.
It was essentially the pioneer of life on land about 425 million years ago, when most creatures still lived in water.
The researchers say this creature probably lived on the banks of a lake at the time, mostly deriving from decomposing plants.
To obtain these results, the team used zircon to determine the age of the fossils, which are small, solid and mineral grains of silicon, oxygen, and zirconium, and contain radioactive elements such as thorium and uranium.
Using this technique in three locations in the United Kingdom known to contain some samples from the ancestors of millipedes, the researchers found that the samples on Kerira Island in Scotland are the oldest, dating back to about 425 million years, while the ages of the samples in the other two sites ranged between 420 million years and 414 million years .
After a careful study of the sites where similar fossils had previously been found and ascertaining that no older specimens were present, the study authors concluded that the fossilized remains in their hands belonging to the first ancestor of the millipede were able to live on land.
The evidence also found that the flowering of plant organisms occurred approximately 40 million years later.
Reconsidering the postulates
The researchers believe that this discovery will push the scientific community - especially evolutionary biologists - to reconsider many of the Muslim women that are in vogue in the emergence of life on land, as this fossil represents a distant ancestor supposedly developed from the first animals that went on land, which enters a disorder in Tree evolution of these objects and their location in the timeline.
This discovery, they say, also raises some interesting questions about the evolution of insects, plants and animals that seem to have happened faster than many scientists think.
The leap by these creatures to transform from aquatic to terrestrial organisms occurred in only 40 million years, which is a very short time in the context of the development of all living organisms, and it seems that the spread of these creatures all over the world has occurred as well faster than expected.
And the new fossils prove that the first millennial worms appeared 75 million years ago, not as most scientists previously believed.
Other dating techniques that were used in plant fossils in the same region enabled similar results, which further indicates that evolution was much faster than scientists had estimated.
It appears that the results of the new study have scattered the elements that underpin the most acceptable theories among scientists to describe the process of the development of primitive life on Earth, and in return have returned the theory of rapid development that was not widely accepted to the fore again.