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Kate: Have you seen the movie "The Time Machine?"
Visitor: Yes, why do you ask?
Kate: Do you remember the scene when the main character is sitting in the time machine and epochs change around him, rocks appear and go? This scene could be shot here in the Zachełmie reservation . Look around you. Rocks separated by 140 million years form the walls.
Visitor: I've read that life came ashore somewhere here. It was a sensational discovery in 2010. "Nature" wrote about it.
Kate: Yes. Take a look here, at these traces. These are traces of Tetrapod, a brave four-legged creature, which lived long before the dinosaurs.
Visitor: Why brave?
Kate: It was the first quadruped who dared to get out of a warm, shallow sea and go see what's on the other side of that hill. And all around him it was empty, slushy mud under his short limbs. Thus life on land began .
Visitor: It is a short walk for a Tetrapod, but one giant leap for evolution. I feel like I'm looking at Armstrong's footprints on the moon.
Kate: These are probably more important.
Visitor: What did he eat?
Kate: Small creatures washed up by the tide of the sea. Also traces of the first land plants were found in the area .
Visitor: How could traces be left in a rock?
Kate: When tetrapod walked here, there was mud on the border between sea and land, so traces were formed on soft ground.
Visitor: Were they not washed by the waves? I remember when I walked on a beach …
Kate: If traces are quickly filled with other material, they remain. That's what happened here. These are the oldest land traces of the first tetrapods in the world, and traces are more important than bones.
Visitor: Why?
Kate: Because they prove that he walked, not ony was there. He walked, more or less like a lizard.
Visitor: What else has this finding changed in our knowledge?
Kate: It moved the date of the beginning of life on land back about 18 million years.
Visitor: There will be amendments textbooks.
Kate: Probably. In addition, previously it was thought that some small creatures crawled out from rivers and lakes, while tetrapod came from the sea and wasn't small.
Visitor: Well, these tracks are quite large. How big was the tetrapod?
Kate: He was about 2 and a half metres long.
Visitor: Well, it's good that we won't be meeting him here. I wonder what else is hidding behind these rocks.
Kate: Now we will go on a journey to the center of the Earth in a special 5D capsule , but that's a different place - Geoeducation Center in Kielce.
Visitor: Will you teach me how to buy a ticket in Polish?
Kate: A ticket to the centre of the Earth? Well, every occasion is good to learn some language.
