News Paleontology

A textbook assumption about early land vertebrates may be wrong

The shift from water to land didn’t require amphibian-like metamorphosis, fossils reveal

An illustration shows a baby version of an early vertebrate that would have made the transition from water to land. It's a mini version of an adult-sized one seen in the background of this underwater scene.

Early vertebrates that made the transition from water to land were born looking like smaller versions of their parents, as this illustration of crocodile-like embolomeres shows.

©Gabriel Ugueto

By Jay Bennett

New fossil evidence is overturning a long-held assumption about how vertebrates first transitioned from water to land. The hatchlings of three different animals related to the earliest land-goers show that the animals did not go through an amphibian-like metamorphosis, researchers report June 18 in Science.