Footprints preserved in stone in Lesotho suggest that animals with birdlike feet walked around 215 million years ago, long before the earliest known birds.
The earliest fossils believed to be ancestors of modern birds date back 150 to 160 million years.
Researchers Miengah Abrahams and Emese Bordy from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, studied footprints at a site called Maphutseng and four other sites in Lesotho.
The footprints, named Trisauropodiscus, revealed distinctively-shaped three-toed footprints with a birdlike appearance and another group resembling dinosaur footprints with birdlike hips, known as Anomoepus. This discovery suggests that birdlike feet evolved much earlier than birds, potentially in different animal groups.
Although it is unclear which animal made the footprints, it is believed to be a dinosaur. However, the specific species remains unknown due to the lack of comparable records in the local fossil record.
