“Trails found in rocks dating back 565 million years are thought to be the earliest evidence of animal locomotion ever found.
The newly-discovered fossils, from rocks in Newfoundland in Canada, were analysed by an international team led by Oxford University scientists. They identified over 70 fossilised trails indicating that some ancient creatures moved, in a similar way to modern sea anemones, across the seafloors of the Ediacaran Period.
The team publish a report of their research in the February edition of the journal Geology.
‘The markings we’ve found clearly indicate that these organisms could exert some sort of muscular control during locomotion,’ said Alex Liu of Oxford University’s Department of Earth Sciences, an author of the paper. ‘This is exciting because it is the first evidence that creatures from this early period of Earth’s history had muscles to allow them to move around – enabling them to hunt for food or escape adverse local conditions and, importantly, indicating that they were probably animals.’”
Read more at Physorg.com (Thanks SuZi)
Abeo, d’you know we’re being directed to the wrong pages via the twitter urls? Keep getting old blog post about Facebook drawing comp when hitting on the links. I’m having flashbacks to the ARG – even been checking the page sources!
Msg From Abeo: That’ll explain why we are getting so much traffic to that page then! Thanks for pointing it out. I’ll get it fixed
Animal locomotion? When did animals start riding trains?
Seriously though, this is brilliant stuff. I’ve got a huge collection of geodes and a 50 million year old shark tooth (also found a fossilised ammonite when I was seven, but someone nicked it from me
) and they’re all amazing enough, but tracks?!…. 
Jess – I am sure the animal tracks are simply that. Like when there is snow and you can see a track of bird or fox prints. It all sounds really cool. And something atheists can no doubt use, yet again. Also did some fish have legs and then evolve into fish? Maybe thats what the prints are.
@ spiderabc1 Er…Yeah, I know they’re animal tracks. You didn’t think I actually meant train tracks or something, did you?
No offence Jess but I wasn’t sure if you knew what it meant. Even though you have a collection which sounds great and I’m rather jealous of the sharks tooth.