Scottish fossil confirmed as earliest breathing creature

A FOSSIL discovered on a Scottish beach has been confirmed as the earliest known creature to live on dry land, it emerged yesterday.

The fossilised millipede, which is less than one centimetre long, was found a year ago on the shore at Cowie Harbour near Stonehaven, a fishing town just south of Aberdeen.

Scientists say it is around 420 million-years-old, some 20 million years older than what had previously been believed to be the oldest breathing animal a spider-like creature chiselled out of the chert, a type of rock, at Rhynie, also in Aberdeenshire.

The millipede was discovered by an amateur fossil collector and has been named 'Pneumodesmus' by palaeontologists at Yale University and researchers at the National Museums of Scotland, who have been studying the find.

The results have been published in the latest issue of the American Journal of Paleontology.

Dr Lyall Anderson, curator of invertebrate palaeontology at the National Museums, told the Sunday Herald newspaper: "It was obvious to me this was the oldest example of this group of animals that has ever been found."

The site near Stonehaven is well known in fossil collecting circles for its arthropods spidery animals such as sea scorpions.

However, those are all aquatic animals while the Pneumodesmus breathed air.

Dr Anderson continued: "The fact this has got very well developed structures to breathe air suggests there must have been things prior to that which these developed from, so we should be looking further back in time to see if this thing had ancestors."

Dr Heather Wilson of Yale University, who also studied the Pneumodesmus, said: "There's all sorts of other things we can expect to see: it's unlikely we had an ecosystem with just plants and Pneumodesmus. There were probably a whole host of other terrestrial arthropods around at the same time."

It is now hoped more of the ancient fossils can be found on Scottish shores.