The 'oldest reptile' 345 million years ago had gills
I came across an interesting story about the evolution of reptiles and wanted to share it. Westlothiana, a fossil about 345 million years old found in Scotland in 1984, was considered for decades to be the oldest reptile in the world. Now that understanding has been overturned.
A team of American and British researchers used very powerful X-rays at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France to digitally reconstruct the interior of the skull, which had been crushed between rocks. They identified the bones that supported gills and a mouth lined with thousands of tiny teeth. Grooves from blood vessels were preserved in the gill bones, suggesting the gills actually functioned while the animal was alive.
So Westlothiana was not an amniote, the group that includes reptiles, but an older lineage of tetrapods that lived in water like fish or moved between water and land like amphibians. It is interesting that land-oriented traits such as claw-like fingertips had already appeared in this gill-bearing aquatic stage. I personally find it generous and admirable that Smithson, the paleontologist who named this fossil the oldest reptile in 1990, joined the research team. The results were published in the journal Nature (dated September 30, 2026).
When you keep reptiles, you often find yourself imagining what they looked like before they came onto land, and this discovery updates those pictures, textbooks included.
Source: Karapaia
A team of American and British researchers used very powerful X-rays at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France to digitally reconstruct the interior of the skull, which had been crushed between rocks. They identified the bones that supported gills and a mouth lined with thousands of tiny teeth. Grooves from blood vessels were preserved in the gill bones, suggesting the gills actually functioned while the animal was alive.
So Westlothiana was not an amniote, the group that includes reptiles, but an older lineage of tetrapods that lived in water like fish or moved between water and land like amphibians. It is interesting that land-oriented traits such as claw-like fingertips had already appeared in this gill-bearing aquatic stage. I personally find it generous and admirable that Smithson, the paleontologist who named this fossil the oldest reptile in 1990, joined the research team. The results were published in the journal Nature (dated September 30, 2026).
When you keep reptiles, you often find yourself imagining what they looked like before they came onto land, and this discovery updates those pictures, textbooks included.
Source: Karapaia
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