Landmark discovery

Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki, a doctoral student at the Faculty of Biology, has discovered and described the earliest tetrapod tracks. The science magazine Nature of 7^th January publishes a paper "Tetrapod trackways from the early Middle Devonian of Poland" describing fossilized tracks of earliest tetrapod vertebrates that roamed the land. The traces, found in Zachełmie quarry in southern Poland, are by ca. 20 mln years older than any other similar tracks known to date. They originated in marine rather than, as commonly postulated, freshwater environment. This discovery markedly changes our understanding of the origins of tetrapods - our own distant ancestors. The paper is co-authored by Piotr Szrek, Katarzyna Narkiewicz and Marek Narkiewicz (Polish Geological Institute, Warsaw) and Per Erik Ahlberg (Uppsala University, Sweden).