Scientists found an ancient fossil of a scorpion which is roughly 350-million years old in Gondwana. The recent discovery is now considered the oldest land-dwelling animal found in the region.
Gondwana is the southernmost part of the two supercontinents which are part of the original Pangea about 510 to 180 million years ago of the mid-Mesozoic era. It is commonly known as the Southern Hemisphere where Antarctica, South America, Madagascar, Australia, Africa, and some parts of the Arabian and Indian peninsula are located.
Scientists led by Robert Gess, a postdoctoral fellow at Wits University's Evolutionary Studies Institute, considered this discovery remarkable as it is the first time that a land-dwelling invertebrate has been found in Gondwana. They believe that the animal used to roam the land during the Devonian Period or the Age of the Fishes. The period dates back between 405 to 345 million years ago where species living underwater began moving to the land as part of their natural evolution.
"Evidence on the earliest colonization of land animals has up till now come only from the northern hemisphere continent of Laurasia, and there has been no evidence that Gondwana was inhabited by land living invertebrate animals at that time," wrote Gess on the study.
They named the Scorpion fossil as Gondwanascorpio emzantsiensis. It was found near Grahamstown in South Africa's Eastern Cape.
"For the first time we know for certain that not just scorpions, but whatever they were preying on were already present in the Devonian. We now know that by the end the Devonian period Gondwana also, like Laurasia, had a complex terrestrial ecosystem, comprising invertebrates and plants which had all the elements to sustain terrestrial vertebrate life that emerged around this time or slightly later," Gess said to Nature World News.
The study was published in the online journal African Invertebrate.
