Tetrapod Trackway

On the north shore of Valentia Island which lies a short distance off the coast of County Kerry is a fossilised trackway.


These imprints are believed to date from the Devonian period, about 350 million years ago when a tetrapod, a form of primitive vertebrate, walked the muddy coastline, dragging its lizard like tail behind it as it climbed ashore. The tracks which the tetrapod left behind were by some fluke, preserved.


The 1-metre-long tetrapod which left its tracks in the mud did so some 150 million years before the dinosaurs during the Devonian period, meaning that these fossilised tracks are among the oldest fossils on the island of Ireland and the oldest evidence in the world of four-legged vertebrates walking on land. The early amphibians like the one which left these tracks over the millennia evolved into mammals and ultimately into humans.


The Valentia Island Tetrapod Trackway is of international importance as it provides some of the oldest evidence for the important evolutionary step of a water dwelling creature crawling out of the water to live on the land.


The trackway was first discovered in 1993 by Iwan Stossel a Swiss a geology student who spotted the tracks on a ripple marked bed of rock.

It is now known that there are at least 5 separate tracks at Valentia, with longest being 15 metres in length. All the tracks display overlapping pairs of impression with some drag marks possibly from the amphibian’s tail or body. Expert palaeontologists believe the tetrapod was either walking over freshly exposed mud or in very shallow water at the tideline.


The Valentia Island Tetrapod Trackway is one of only four similar trackways know to existing in the world. They are the most extensive of the four. The others are in Tarbet Ness, Scotland; Genoa River, NSW Australia; and Glen Isla, Victoria Australia.

Source: ‘Ireland’s Forgotten Past: A History of the Overlooked & Disremembered’ by Turtle Bunbury (ISBN: 978-0-500-02253-5)