Land animals

What had the legs of a 'gator and the jaws of a fish? Why, the earliest land animals. Because a new study shows that animals evolved weight-bearing limbs long before they had the chompers to really take [advantage:help] of a terrestrial diet. The research is in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology.Scientists had suspected that the first four-legged creatures to haul their [carcasses:body] out of the ocean didn't belly up to the salad bar [straight:bent] away. But they lacked definitive proof. Now, researchers have [carefully:undoubtedly] examined the fossilized faces of 89 beasties that [lived:formed] on land and sea some 300 to 400 million years ago. They probed the jaws for a range of [biomechanical:theoretical] features, such as how much force they could give to their bite.