In 1993, on the picturesque Island of Valentia, County Kerry, Ireland, an undergraduate geology student (Iwan Stossel) made the discovery of a lifetime.

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While examining these rocks on the island's coast he came across a rock platform containing a set of ancient animal footprints. The tracks have since been dated to almost 400 million years ago and are regarded as among the earliest footprints known to science, and certainly the oldest known footprints in Europe.

385 million years ago, most of Southern Ireland was part of a gigantic flood-plain near the equator. Every so often, massive floods inundated the region, depositing large quantities of silt and sand. At one stage a four-legged animal1 walked across this silt as it was drying out. Its tracks were preserved, just as if it had walked across wet concrete.

Access to the site was not easy in my car and I found it hard to find until I asked a local. Without the annoyance of the tour bus crowds that sometimes detract from visits to the more famous sites around the Ireland I sat here for most of the morning simply captivated by where this rock once was and what made them footprints nearly half a billion years ago!.

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The site is of international importance, being well dated at older than 385 million years. About 200 prints represent the passage of a Tetrapod, a primitive four-legged vertebrate, across the soft sediment of a large river floodplain in Devonian times. It is a key record of the important evolutionary step of vertebrates leaving aquatic environments and breathing air on land.