Shock reptile fossil discovery in Victoria
Sabra Lane: Experts say it's a gobsmacking discovery in Victoria's high country. A rock with several clawed footprints is rewriting history as it proves that reptiles appeared 35 to 40 million years earlier than previously thought. Two amateur fossil hunters found it, as Isabel Moussalli reports.
Isabel Moussalli: In Victoria's Broken River near Mansfield, a builder and a winemaker share an intriguing hobby.
John Eason: My wife and I first moved to this area 30 odd years ago. We knew, or I knew especially, that there were interesting fossils.
Isabel Moussalli: That's John Eason.
John Eason: And we formed a little group of friends who all shared the interest, 10 of us I'd say, and once or twice a year we'd kind of go and explore various areas.
Isabel Moussalli: One day in 2021, it was just John and Craig Eury on the hunt when they noticed something different.
Craig Eury: Yeah, it was just sitting there as a loose slab of rock and we were just fortunate the light was hitting it on the right angle which illuminated through shadows. The high points were illuminated, the low points were shadowed out and we were able to see it in that format, which was great.
John Eason: We immediately knew that they were footprints but they were pretty faint and we kind of assumed that they would be amphibian footprints because the earliest land animals were amphibians.
Isabel Moussalli: So they reached out to an expert at Flinders University, who also took it to Sweden for further study. The team have determined these tracks in Taungurung country belonged to reptiles and the rest is rewritten history.
John Long: It was a gobsmacking discovery, honestly, we never expected in a million years that we would find the trackways of the earliest reptile-like creatures from right here in Victoria near Mansfield.
Isabel Moussalli: John Long is a professor of paleontology at Flinders. He believes the footprints belonged to a small and stumpy goanna-like animal.
John Long: We have trackways showing animals with hooked claws, both on their hands and feet, which clearly means they're part of the early reptile group. But the bigger group that these reptiles belong to is called the amniotes, which include reptiles, mammals and birds. So it's really the earliest evidence of the line leading to us humans on the planet.
Isabel Moussalli: And that's about 355 million years old, according to the peer-reviewed research published in the journal Nature.
John Long: That's 35 million years older than the previous records from the Northern Hemisphere and about 120 million years older than the first dinosaurs. But the really interesting thing about the discovery is we're also indicating that maybe reptiles, this whole group, could have possibly originated in Gondwana, the great southern supercontinent.
Isabel Moussalli: Professor Long hopes there'll soon be more similar discoveries in the area. But John Eason and Craig Eury are pretty stoked to have made this one.
John Eason: And that is scientifically significant. And so we've now got this great honour of having our find featured in an article in Nature, the premier research journal in the world. And I could not be happier.
Sabra Lane: Newly published study author, John Eason. Ending that report by Isabel Moussalli and Annie Brown.
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