Ichthyostega
Ichthyostega stensioei
Ichthyostega documents the transition from fish to land animal, one of the great steps in vertebrate evolution.
Image: OlegTarabanov · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
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Characteristics
- Scientific name
- Ichthyostega stensioei
- Period
- Late Devonian (Famennian)
- Lived
- 365–360 Ma (365 million years ago)
- Diet
- Carnivore
- Habitat
- Freshwater, Swamp
- Length (estimate)
- 1.5 m
- Discovered/described
- 1932 · Gunnar Säve-Söderbergh (description)
Description
Ichthyostega was one of the earliest four-legged vertebrates: an animal about one and a half metres long with lungs, strong forelimbs and seven toes on each hind foot. It lived mainly in shallow water, but its ribs and shoulder girdle could partly support its body on land. It was not an amphibian in the modern sense but a stem tetrapod, long before the first true amphibians.
Habitat
Shallow swamps and river deltas on the coast of what is now East Greenland.
Fossil sites
East Greenland
Contemporaries in the database
Sources: Ichthyostega