How Early Reptiles Moved

Modern scientists would have loved the sight of early reptiles running across the Bromacker near Tambach-Dietharz (Germany) 300 million years ago.Unfortunately this journey through time is impossible.But due to Dr.Thomas Martens and his team from the Foundation Schloss Friedenstein Gotha numerous skeletons and footprints of early dinosaurs have been found and conserved there during the last forty years.

Skink Emma in the hand of zoologist Dr.John Nyakatura from Jena UniversityВ 

«It is the most important find spot of primitive quadruped vertebrates from the Perm in Europe,« says Professor Dr.Martin S.Fischer from the University Jena (Germany).The evolutionary biologist and his team together with the Gotha scientists and other partners are now starting a research project not only to analyze the locomotion of these primeval saurians.They also want to set them back into motion at least in animation.The Volkswagen Foundation (VolkswagenStiftung) will support the project with about 288.000 Euro during the next two years.«Our first major palaeontologic project«, as zoologist Fischer delightedly calls it.

The fossils found on the Bromacker date back to the oldest fully terrestrial vertebrates.These so-called amniotes are the first real «land-dwelling animals».This became possible through a first evolutionary step in which they laid a completely encapsulated egg in whose в