The Wright brothers may have changed the course of human history with their first recorded flight back in 1903, but birds have been doing that for millions of years. Thanks to a recent discovery of a small shorebird in Australian rocks, that evolutionary trajectory has been pushed back further, more than 100 million years old in fact.

“The track seemed familiar, like a face I had seen before but couldn’t quite identify,” said Anthony Martin, a paleontologist from Emory University, in blog describing the find. “Then I realized who it belonged to, and where I had seen many others like it. It was a bird track, remarkably similar to those in the sands and muds of the Georgia coast, made daily by the herons, egrets, and shorebirds.”

His findings, which appear in the current issue of “Paleontology,” describe the backward-facing fourth toe that birds use to grab tree branches. While most all dinosaurs and birds leave three-toed footprint, it’s the birds capable of flight that possess the fourth toe. Martin believes the impression was left by a small bird, similar in size to a modern-day tricolored heron.

Not all birds have the “hallux,” as it’s called, and even some dinosaurs were found to possess it. What makes Martin believe this impression comes from a bird of flight is the position of the fourth toe, which make the appearance of a peace sign. For example, the famous Tyrannosaurus rex does have a fourth toe, but because it is near his Achilles tendon, it would not show up in a footprint.

Two Museum Victoria volunteers found the sandstone rock with the footprint—alongside two other footprints—on November 29, 2010. The footprints were roughly the same size, and one of them lacking the hallux imprint. Because sand dries quickly, Martin believes the prints were made around the same time, suggesting the three animals shared an ecosystem.

Australia was in a very different place on the earth 100 million years ago, and had a totally different ecosystem, too. Dinosaur Cove, located at the southeastern tip of Australia and is where the footprints were found, was a temperate region close to the South Pole those many eons ago. This was also during the time when birds and non-avian dinosaurs moved their separate evolutionary ways.

So this fossil may offer answers to questions that Martin has. “Could I be wrong about taking one track and interpreting it as evidence of flight? That’s possible. Let’s just celebrate this find for what it is.”