Finding the longest set of footprints left by the first vertebrate

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 12 March 2024

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 1992 off the coast of Ireland, a Swiss geology student accidentally discovered the longest set of footprints made by the first four-legged animals to walk on earth.

They pointed to a new date for the key milestone in evolution when the first amphibians left the water 385 million years ago. The salamander-type animal which was the size of a basset hound lived when County Kerry was semi-arid, long before dinosaurs, as Iwan Stössel explains to Josephine McDermott.

(Picture: Artwork of a primitive tetrapod. Credit: Christian Jegou/ Science Photo Library)

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	BBC Sounds.
0:02.0	Hello everyone, it's Michelle Vassage, and welcome to my podcast Rule Breakers.
0:06.0	But you'll sit down and be bright.
0:08.0	Celebrating women's voices.
0:10.0	You're very welcome to now you're asking with me, Marion Keys Keys and me Tara Flynn.
0:14.7	This is juicy. No limits, no limits.
0:17.1	Celebrating women.
0:18.6	Where to be a woman is the podcast celebrating the best of women's well-being. We're on a quest to find out
0:24.4	where in the world women are living their best lives. Celebrate yourself.
0:28.5	Lesson on BBC Sounds. Where to be a woman is the podcast celebrating the best of women's well-being.
0:37.0	Listen now, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. You're listening to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Josephine McDermott. In 1992 off the coast of Ireland, a Swiss
0:56.4	geology student accidentally discovered the longest set of footprints made by the
1:00.8	first four-legged animals ever to walk the earth.
1:05.0	If you looked carefully at the imprints you could recognize a larger one, a smaller one, a larger one, a larger one, a smaller one a larger one a larger one a smaller one a smaller one a really regular pattern
1:19.0	Yvonne Stursle is living out of a bed and breakfast hotel cycling each morning to take a boat or cross a bridge to an island called Valencia in Kerry in the Republic of Ireland.
1:29.0	He has his orange field notebook with him.
1:32.0	Thankfully it's waterproof because it's been raining most of the day.
1:35.0	He's been coming here daily for a month and a half,
1:38.0	and once he dropped it into the sea, he's wet through,
1:41.0	and another day mapping the volcanic geology of the place on his own for his undergraduate diploma is drawing to a close.
1:48.0	He just has one ridge of rock near the shore to look at before he goes.
1:53.0	The light conditions were horrible.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.