* This article has been updated to note a change.

Over a million years ago a bird the size of a "great egret or small heron" left its prints on the sands of a neighboring river bank on the coast of southern Victoria. Scientists found them and documented their findings this month in the journal Paleontolgoy, according to CNN. The tracks are the oldest ever found in Australia.

Not much is known about the bird species that left its tracks. For now scientists are calling it a prehistoric species of the Cretaceous Period that compares in size to a great egret, according to CNN. Anthony Martin, a paleontologist at Emory University who led the expedition, said the remains definitely belonged to a bird because of a drag mark leading up to one of the footprints.

The four-toed prints (the hind pointing in the opposite direction) were discovered in an area on the coast of southern Victoria known as Dinosaur Cove, named for its rich supply of dinosaur bones, CNN reported. Next to the bird's prints were those of a flying dinosaur and the closet known relative to birds called the Coelurosaurus. At the time the tracks were cast, Australia and Antarctica were connected and the earth's climate was much warmer.

"These tracks are evidence that we had sizeable, flying birds living alongside other kinds of dinosaurs on these polar, river floodplains, about 105 million years ago," said Anthony Martin, a paleontologist at Emory University who led the expedition.

The presence of a backwards toe will be a key focus of the discovery, CNN reported. Certain bird species, in addition to dinosaurs like the T Rex, have possessed an opposite-facing toe throughout time. Studying how that feature has changed could provide important insights into how particular species evolved.

"In some dinosaur lineages, that rear toe got longer instead of shorter and made a great adaptation for perching up in trees," Martin said in a statement. "Tracks and other trace fossils offer clues to how non-avian dinosaurs and birds evolved and started occupying different ecological niches."