A jaw full of ancestral reality from Latvia and Estonia could fill a vital gap in the history of life on earth.

The discovery of two lower jaw fragments from a 1.3 meter crocodilelike creature that lived 370 million years ago was announced last week by Dr. Pers Ahlberg from the Natural History Museum of London and could be the missing link that reveals how our ancestors paddled out of swampy shallows to live on land. Ahlberg, together with Baltic researchers Dr. Ervins Luksevics from the Natural History Museum of Latvia in Riga and Dr.Elga Kurik from Tallinn`s Geological Institute, have affectionately named the creature "Livonia multidentato" for now because of its unprecedented five rows of lower teeth. The ancient land of Livonia, where the specimens were unearthed from sandstone deposits left over from a worldwide climate shift, included central Latvia and southern Estonia."I was very very surprised by the discovery," said Luksevics. "The fossil has been in a drawer in our museum for about 11 years. It was originally found in 1964 by Teodors Kams, a private collector, whose collection was donated to the museum upon his death." Ahlberg discovered a second jawbone fragment from Estonia at the Estonian Geological Institute, where it had been stowed away unrecognized for nearly 50 years.