Pneumodesmus Newmani (Paperback)

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Pneumodesmus newmani is a species of millipede that lived 428 million years ago, in the Late Silurian.It is the first myriapod. It is also the oldest known creature to have lived on land. It was discovered in 2004, and is known from a single specimen from Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. The single, 1 cm-long fragment of P. newmani was found by Mike Newman, a bus driver and amateur palaeontologist from Aberdeen, in a layer of sandstone rocks on the foreshore of Cowie, near Stonehaven. The species was later given the specific epithet "newmani" in honour of Newman. The holotype is kept in National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh. The fossil is important because its cuticle contains openings which are interpreted as spiracles, part of a gas exchange system that would only work in air. This makes P. newmani the earliest arthropod with a tracheal system, and indeed the first oxygen-breathing animal on land.