The prints of the tetrapods -- four-legged animals -- are 18 million years older than previously confirmed findings of tetrapod tracks, said Per Ahlberg, a paleontologist at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Ahlberg and his colleagues found fossilized prints of up to 10.2 inches wide, indicating an animal of about 8.2-feet in length. The track paths were estimated to be 395-million years old and showed no evidence of a dragging body, the journal Nature said in a release Wednesday.

Many scientists had believed tetrapods evolved from fish with an intermediate stage as elpistostegids -- creatures that had a tetrapod-like head and body but paired fins instead of hands and feet.

The tracks found in Poland, however, are 10 million years older than the oldest elpistostegid fossils, which suggests elpistostegids were late-surviving relics rather than transitional forms, Ahlberg said.

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