An artist’s reconstruction of the 360 million-year-old Late Devonian world in which the first known polar tetrapods lived. Tutusius, right, eyes potential prey while Umzantsia, left, dives deeper into the brackish estuary the animals called home. All animals and plants shown have been found as fossils at the same South African site. (Credit: Maggie Newman)
Hey, tetrapod! Yeah, I'm talking to you. There's a big update to the story of the earliest tetrapods — the first four-limbed vertebrates to move onto land and eventually evolve into us, among other things. The new find changes a fundamental assumption about our early ancestors, and it's pretty cool. Evolving from a branch of lobe-finned fishes more than 375 million years ago, tetrapods
gradually traded water for land over the next several million years. Eventually, they would become one of the most diverse superclasses of life on Earth, evolving into lineages as diverse as ...
