Researchers said the fossil of the Silurian Period creature, called Kampecaris obanensis as well as uncovered on the island of Kerrera in the Scottish Inner Hebrides, inhabited a lakeside environment as well as likely ate rotting plants.

While Kampecaris is the earliest land pet known from a fossil, soil worms are believed to have preceded it, appearing maybe 450 million years earlier, according to paleontologist Michael Brookfield of the University of Texas and also the University of Massachusetts Boston, lead author of the research published this month in the journal Historical Biology.

Life initially developed in the globe’s seas, with a surge of variety start about 540 million years earlier.

Kampecaris, about an inch (2.5 cm) long with a segmented body, resembled modern millipedes but was a member of an extinct group and is not ancestral to millipedes alive today. Its legs were not preserved in the fossil.

It was an arthropod, a broad group that includes insects, spiders, millipedes, centipedes and crustaceans like crabs and shrimp.

Life first evolved in the world’s oceans, with an explosion of diversity beginning roughly 540 million years ago. It took quite some time for life to emerge onto land, beginning with plants likes mosses approximately 450 million years ago. The later advent of plants with stems like Cooksonia helped usher in more complex terrestrial ecosystems.

The first land vertebrates – amphibians that evolved from fish with brawny fins that inhabited shallow waters – showed up about 375 million years ago – ancestors of the reptiles, birds and mammals alive today including our species, which first appeared about 300,000 years ago.