Surprising fossils suggest early animals survived outside of water

Animals living about 500 million years ago spent time on mudflats that were periodically exposed to the air. The finding suggests that some of the earliest animals were able to survive outside of water, if only for a limited time – tens of millions of years before some animals started living permanently on land.

“They must have had mechanisms to cope with some of the stressors of this environment,” says Giovanni Mussini at the University of Cambridge. “There was already the genetic…