In 1984, an amateur palaeontologist found a small, nearly complete fossil in a quarry in West Lothian, Scotland. The creature, later named Westlothiana lizziae, is about 20 centimetres long and resembles a salamander. It is one of the earliest known examples of a four-limbed animal that had made the transition from water to land, a stem tetrapod: a common ancestor of every amphibian, reptile, bird, and mammal alive today, including humans. Despite its significance, no one had managed to accurately date it.

New research from The University of Texas at Austin, published in PLOS One, places Westlothiana lizziae and several similar creatures from the same Scottish site at a maximum age of around 341 million years — roughly 10 million years older than the previous estimate of 331 million. The figure of 346 million years, cited in some accounts of the research, represents the oldest individual zircon grain recovered; the study’s central estimate, derived from seven dates, is 341 ± 3 million years. That revision of 14 to 15 million years matters because it moves the specimens into a specific and poorly-understood period in the fossil record called Romer’s Gap.

This is one study, not settled consensus, and the dating method produces a maximum age rather than a precise one. What it offers is a better constraint on timing than anything previously available for these particular specimens.

What Romer’s Gap is

Romer’s Gap refers to the period from roughly 360 to 345 million years ago. It is named after the American palaeontologist Alfred Romer, who noticed in the mid-twentieth century that the fossil record from this window is strikingly sparse. The transition from water-dwelling fish to four-limbed land animals is thought to have happened during or around this period, but the fossils that should document that process are largely absent. Whether the gap reflects a real collapse in animal populations, a geological accident that destroyed the record, or simply a research blind spot is still debated.

The East Kirkton Quarry, where the Scottish fossils were found, sits in what was, hundreds of millions of years ago, a tropical landscape with active volcanoes and a toxic lake. Seven stem tetrapod fossils have been recovered there, including Westlothiana lizziae. The site is one of the better-preserved early tetrapod records in the world. What it had lacked was a reliable date.

Why dating the site was difficult

The standard technique for dating ancient rocks is uranium-lead radiometric dating, which relies on zircon crystals. Zircons form in certain rock types, particularly those that cool slowly from molten material. The East Kirkton site sits near ancient volcanoes whose flows hardened into basalt, a rock type where zircons do not typically form. Colleagues warned Hector Garza, the doctoral student at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences who led the study, that trying to extract datable zircons from these rocks was likely to produce nothing.

He tried anyway. The key turned out to be that as material eroded from the volcanic surroundings, sediment containing zircons washed into a lake where limestone was forming. That limestone entombed the early tetrapods, and with it came the zircons Garza needed. He X-rayed 11 rock samples and extracted zircons from six of them. He then conducted uranium-lead laser dating on those zircons at the University of Houston.

The result is a maximum age of 346 million years, placing the specimens inside Romer’s Gap.

What the new age does, and does not, establish

“Better constraining the age of these fossils is key to understanding the timing of the emergence of vertebrates on to land,” said Julia Clarke, professor at the Jackson School and a co-author of the paper. “Timing in turn is key to assessing why this transition occurs when it does and what factors in the environment may be linked to this event.”

That framing is careful, and it is worth taking seriously. The new dating does not explain why the transition from water to land happened when it did. It does not fill Romer’s Gap; it places specific specimens within it. The significance is that it becomes harder to argue these creatures lived outside the Gap, which means they were alive during the period palaeontologists most want to understand.

What drove animals from water to land, whether climate, competition, the availability of food, or some combination, remains an open question. Having better-dated specimens from within the Gap gives researchers a fixed point to work from when trying to connect evolutionary timing to environmental conditions.

Other co-authors on the paper include Associate Professor Elizabeth Catlos and Michael Brookfield of the UT Jackson School, and Thomas Lapen of the University of Houston. The National Museum of Scotland provided rock samples surrounding the fossils for analysis.

The next step, according to the paper’s authors, is to use the more precise age estimate as a reference point for understanding what was happening to the environment around the time these animals were alive, and whether that context helps explain the transition the fossils represent.

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ASKAP J1745-5051 pulses in radio light every 1.345 hours, and its X-rays flicker on nearly the same clock.

That clock is not the spin of a solitary neutron star. In a Nature Astronomy paper published on June 1, 2026, Kovi Rose and colleagues identify the source as an accreting white dwarf binary, a compact pair in which a dense stellar remnant is drawing material from a lower-mass companion.

The system is named ASKAP J174508.9-505149, shortened by the team to ASKAP J1745-5051. It was found with CSIRO’s Australian SKA Pathfinder, or ASKAP, and then followed up in radio, optical, ultraviolet and X-ray light.

The result does not solve every long-period radio transient. It does something narrower and more useful: it gives astronomers one confirmed physical system that can be compared against the rest of the strange class.

The pulse was tied to an orbit

Long-period radio transients are coherent bursts of polarized radio emission that repeat on timescales of minutes to hours. That is what made them so awkward.

Ordinary radio pulsars are neutron stars rotating far faster, often on timescales of milliseconds to seconds. Thomas Gold’s classic 1968 Nature paper argued that pulsating radio sources could be rotating neutron stars with beamed magnetospheric emission, a model that became one of the foundations of pulsar astronomy.

The newer long-period objects sit uneasily beside that model. Some proposed explanations involved ultra-slow neutron stars or magnetars, but others pointed toward compact white dwarf binaries.

ASKAP J1745-5051 lands firmly in the second camp. Rose’s team measured a spectroscopic orbital period of 1.368 hours and a radio pulse period of 1.34497 hours, close enough to show that the radio signal is locked to the binary system rather than to a freely spinning isolated object.

The source is a magnetic cataclysmic variable

A white dwarf is a dead stellar core, roughly Earth-sized but with a mass often comparable to the Sun. In ASKAP J1745-5051, that compact remnant is paired with a red dwarf companion in an orbit so tight it completes a circuit in just over an hour.

Follow-up spectra showed strong hydrogen and helium emission lines, the signature of a magnetic cataclysmic variable. In that kind of system, gas pulled from the companion does not simply fall inward in a quiet stream.

The white dwarf’s magnetic field shapes the flow. Material is guided through magnetized plasma and can crash down near the white dwarf’s magnetic regions, producing high-energy emission.

The University of Sydney announcement described the system as a rare white dwarf binary and said the smaller, dense star is accreting material from the larger but less dense companion. It also described the discovery as a “Rosetta Stone” for understanding these mysterious signals.

The X-rays made the case stronger

The radio pulses alone would have been suggestive. The X-rays made the system much harder to dismiss.

The team found X-ray emission varying with a period of 1.32 hours, within the uncertainties of the orbital and radio periods. The X-ray flux also changed by more than an order of magnitude, behavior consistent with variable accretion in a compact binary.

That matters because ASKAP J1745-5051 is only the third long-period radio transient detected at X-ray wavelengths, after ASKAP J1448 and ASKAP J1832-0911. The Nature Astronomy paper says the detections fall in the range expected for accretion-generated X-rays in cataclysmic variables.

It is still not a universal answer. The authors state that the result strengthens the link between at least some long-period transients and white dwarf binaries, not that every object in the class has the same origin.

Why the old neutron-star answer became less tidy

The neutron-star idea did not appear from nowhere. Neutron stars are the established engines behind many pulsing radio sources, and magnetars can produce extreme bursts of energy.

But long-period transients stretch that picture. Their periods can run from minutes to hours, and several models struggle to produce bright coherent radio emission from an isolated compact object rotating that slowly.

ASKAP J1745-5051 changes the argument by giving the pulse a mechanical clock. The orbit itself appears to organize the radio and X-ray behavior.

That puts it beside another important case, ILT J1101+5521, which emits minute-long radio pulses every 125.5 minutes. In that system, the pulse period is also tied to the orbital period of a white dwarf and M dwarf binary.

ASKAP found the blip and made it local

The instrument is part of the story. CSIRO says ASKAP has 36 dish antennas in Western Australia, each 12 metres wide, working together across about six square kilometres.

ASKAP’s wide field of view and survey speed make it unusually good at finding radio sources that vary or appear unexpectedly. Its science archive also turns those detections into a searchable record rather than a one-off glimpse.

Once ASKAP localized ASKAP J1745-5051, the team could bring in other telescopes. Optical spectroscopy with SOAR and Magellan identified the cataclysmic-variable signature, while Swift and Einstein Probe observations supplied the ultraviolet and X-ray pieces.

That chain matters because a radio transient without a counterpart is only a strange flash. A radio transient with spectra, X-rays and a measured orbit becomes a physical system.

The rest of the class is still unsettled

ASKAP J1832-0911 shows why the problem is not finished. A 2025 Nature paper reported radio and X-ray emission from that object on a 44.2-minute period, with properties unlike any known Galactic object.

Some models treat objects like that as possible magnetars. Others invoke white dwarfs, accretion, magnetic interaction or even more exotic engines.

The cleaner conclusion is that long-period transients may not have one parent population. Some may be white dwarf binaries. Some may be magnetars or other compact objects. Some may remain stranger until better timing, polarization and multiwavelength follow-up pins them down.

For ASKAP J1745-5051, the clock is now visible. Every 1.3 hours, the radio source brightens, the X-rays answer, and a pair of stars too faint to see with the naked eye marks time by stripping matter across a space smaller than many stellar systems ever become.

The post In 2026, Kovi Rose traced a 1.3-hour radio pulse and matching X-ray flicker to ASKAP J1745-5051, a white-dwarf system so tight that the orbit itself appears to become the clock appeared first on Space Daily.