This little creature, some 3½ cm in length and probably a relative of present-day centipedes and millipedes (myriapods), was crawling around what is now Australia almost 400 million years ago. As G. D. Edgecombe reports elsewhere in this issue (Nature 394, 172–175; 1998), this fossil and a younger one were identified in deposits that date to the Early and Mid Devonian, respectively, and plausibly become the oldest-known Australian land animals. That they were terrestrial is surmised from what seems to be a spiracle, the external opening of the tracheal system employed by air-breathing arthropods, of which myriapods are a constituent group.

In the Devonian, today's southern continents plus India were formed into the supercontinent Gondwanaland. Previous examples of terrestrial arthropods of Devonian age have come only from the other supercontinent of the time, Laurasia. Most notably, the new fossils are assigned to the genus Maldybulakia from Kazakhstan, and so greatly extend the known geographical range of this type of myriapod.

That begs the question of how the two places might have been connected in the past. Edgecombe points to a Lower Devonian reconstruction which links Kazakhstan and Australia by a land bridge through north China. Further specimens might be found there.

One hopes, however, that miracles of fossilization mean that other examples will be the remains of complete animals. These two have lost their heads.