Ancient reptile footprints are rewriting the history of when animals evolved

https://apnews.com/article/oldest-reptile-footprints-australia-963e3c38c8d5782e7ac20f5405f15f89

32•gmays•8mo ago

Comments

veunes•8mo ago

The detail that really stuck with me was the presence of claws. That small anatomical feature says so much

singularity2001•8mo ago

on the other hand I have seen fish with claws

metalman•8mo ago

And now I need to take a closer look at a small trackway that I brought home, after I might add watching a greater portion erode out of a cliff face and disapear into the surf over a few years, not that there is any shortage of animal fossils and other things like fossilised rain and wave impressions, literaly 1000's of km³. As to the information that can be extracted from a trackway, it would be intetesting to run these past indiginous trackers and have them consult with scientists to train field workers doing palentological research, a realy realy cold trail.

veunes•8mo ago

How much information is just sitting in those little impressions, waiting to be interpreted

adityaathalye•8mo ago

Getting Silurian Hypothesis vibes [1], thinking about subduction, glaciers, the rise and abatement of sea levels, and just plain ol' erosion and corrosion.

That something so incredibly ephemeral as footprints in dirt could survive longer than the rings of Saturn is breathtaking. Except Sharks. Sharks are not only breath-taking, they are forever [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Astronomy/comments/dp7key/things_in...

hydrogen7800•8mo ago

>Except Sharks

My favorite shark fact is that they pre-date trees.

adityaathalye•8mo ago

I think it's good that Sharks pre-dated, and not predated Trees. Because then we wouldn't be around talking about them.

hydrogen7800•8mo ago

Ha, nice catch. I considered the pun as I posted, but decided to just leave it as an easter egg.

gnabgib•8mo ago

The paper's very readable: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08884-5 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44033911)

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

The Waymo World Model

How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes

What Is Ruliology?

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

Dark Alley Mathematics

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

An Update on Heroku

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

How to effectively write quality code with AI

Zlob.h 100% POSIX and glibc compatible globbing lib that is faste and better

Show HN: R3forth, a ColorForth-inspired language with a tiny VM

Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo

Why I Joined OpenAI

I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

Learning from context is harder than we thought

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

FORTH? Really!?

Show HN: ARM64 Android Dev Kit

Show HN: Smooth CLI – Token-efficient browser for AI agents