* Astronomy

Researchers at the National Museums of Scotland have identified the earliest known creature to crawl out of the primordial soup – and it washed up at Stonehaven.
In a joint project with Yale University, palaeontologists have studied an unusual one-centimetre-long segment of fossilised millipede prised out of an ancient siltstone bed outcropping on the foreshore at Cowie harbour, near Stonehaven, in Aberdeenshire.
The results, published in the American Journal Of Palaeontology, show that the millipede had spiracles, or primitive breathing structures on the outside of its body, making it the oldest air-breathing creature ever to have existed.



At some 420 million years old, it is 20 million years older than what had previously been thought of as the oldest breathing animal – a peculiar spider-like creature chiselled out of the chert – a kind of rock – at Rhynie, also in Aberdeenshire.
The new species is being named Pneumodesmus newmani after Mike Newman, the amateur fossil hunter who found it, and from the Greek pneumato, meaning air or breath.
Newman, of Kemnay, who is a bus driver in Aberdeen by day, is an experienced collector who did not happen upon the fossil by chance.

"I knew that the site had been re-aged, that it was older than originally thought, so I went down there. I knew that any terrestrial-type things with legs found there could be early and important. I had found millipedes there before, but this one had evidence of the holes that showed it actually breathed. I’m interested in particular in fossil fish; I describe the fish in scientific journals, but things like this creature I pass on" - Mike Newman.

At the time the sediments were laid down, trapping the millipede, the landscape would have been one of small streams going over a mudflat – which is ideal fossil country.

"Scotland has the best Palaeozoic – pre-triassic, pre-dinosaur – sites in the world. There’s more sites in the small country of Scotland than the whole of the US and Russia put together. It’s a fantastic place for these very old invertebrates. Just think, the first air-breathing creature crawled out of the swamp at Stonehaven" - Mike Newman.

What’s even more remarkable is that the very first backboned land creature crawled out of the swamp at Elgin. Newman explained that the creature known as Elginerpeton is the oldest tetrapod – or backboned, land-crawling beast – known to man. Around five feet in length, it was a curious transition between a fish and a land creature that lived around 350m years ago.
Newman donated the fossil to the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh.

Dr Lyall Anderson, curator of invertebrate palaeontology at the national museums, knew as soon as he saw Pneumodesmus that it was a significant find.

"It was obvious to me this was the oldest example of this group of animals that has ever been found." - Dr Lyall Anderson.


Latitude 56.96056N Longitude 2.20141W

The site near Stonehaven is well known in fossil collecting circles for its abundance of arthropods – spidery animals such as sea scorpions – but all are aquatic animals.
Conventional wisdom has it that in the Devonian period – 417 to 354 million years ago – two major animal groups colonised the land: tetrapods, or land-living vertebrates, and terrestrial arthropods, including wingless insects and the earliest spiders. The NMS/Yale discovery pushes this back into the mid-Silurian period.
The oldest fossil record of life on Earth consists of microscopic bacteria and algae some 3.5 billion years old.

Meanwhile, back in those lazy, hazy Silurian days, what was destined to become much of Scotland, including Stonehaven, lay in the middle of a large landmass, with the open sea lapping somewhere around the Pentlands and Borders, where today we find marine fossils in rocks of equivalent age. The whole lot, known as the Old Red Sandstone Continent, was lying at about 30 degrees latitude – or twice as close to the Equator as we are at present.
The conditions seem to have produced a creature remarkably similar to present-day millipedes.
Dr Heather Wilson of Yale University carried out the definitive study of Pneumodesmus. She, too, hopes that Stonehaven can produce even older examples of breathing creatures.

"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 orthopods around at the same time. The special ecosystem was probably a lot more complex earlier than we had previously thought" - Dr Heather Wilson.

There is evidence of terrestrial plants around 470m years old, while there are fossilised trackways left in the sediment, probably by millipedes, dating from the Ordovician period, 490m to 443m years ago.
Either way, any new discoveries are likely to be made in Scotland.

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