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LiveScience
LiveScience
Patrick Pester

'A completely different story': 300 million-year-old fossils reveal the first vertebrate land dwellers weren't what we thought, researchers claim

An illustration of a young embolomere with an adult in the background. .

Never-before-seen fossils of newly hatched crocodile-like creatures are shining new light on how our aquatic ancestors conquered land.

Early four-limbed vertebrates (tetrapods), which would eventually give rise to humans, took their first steps on land in the Devonian period, some 419 million to 359 million years ago, marking one of the most important periods in the evolutionary history of animals.

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