The earliest reptile body impressions with scaly skin? …still, no.

Recent superlative claims by
Marchetti et al 2026, claim to push back the date of ‘the oldest skin ever found’ by another 10 million years to 298 mya.

An earlier paper
by Mooney et al 2024 described Captorhinus skin from 288 mya in Oklahoma. (See link below for data).

Marchetti et al 2026 wrote:
“Here, we present the earliest definite fossil occurrence of epidermal scales in stem reptiles, from the early Asselian Goldlauter Formation of Germany. These scales are preserved on a newly described resting trace Cabarzichnus pulchrus n. igen.”

Beware of paleontologists reporting superlatives.
Too often authors exclude prior superlatives by excluding/omitting pertinent taxa and citations hoping that reporters and colleagues will not notice.

We went through this before in 2024. See link below.

The last common ancestor of all reptiles
in the large reptile tree is still Silvanerpeton @ 335mya. And it includes scutes and scales. So recent reports do not describe the ‘oldest known‘.

Perhaps a reptile – or not, Tulerpeton nests in the LRT just outside of the last common ancestor node – and it preserved scales @ 360mya. See link below for data.

Remember,
what makes a reptile a reptile is its status as the last common ancestor of all reptiles and the clade of all of its descendants. And that (presumably) coincides with the appearance of the amniotic membrane, a trait they all extant clade members share in common.

Amniota is a junior synonym for Reptilia in the LRT.
Current college textbooks and Current Biology papers are not up to date on this matter.

References
Clack JA 1994.Silvanerpeton miripedes, a new anthracosauroid from the Visean of East Kirkton, West Lothian, Scotland. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh: Earth Sciences 84 (for 1993), 369–76.
Marchetti et al (6 co-authors) 2026. The earliest reptile body impressions with scaly skin. Current Biology. 2026 Feb 12:S0960-9822(26)00075-8. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2026.01.036. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 41687603.
Mooney ED et al (4 co-authors) 2024. Paleozoic cave system preserves oldest-known evidence of amniote skin. Currenty Biology online
Mondéjar-Fernandez J, Clément G and Sanchez S 2014. New insights into the scales of the Devonian tetrapods Tulerpeton curtum Lebedeve, 1984. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 34:1454-1459.

pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com/2024/06/04/oldest-known-amniote-skin-and-scales-no/

Publicity

science.org/content/article/fossilized-reptile-skin-oklahoma-cave-oldest-record

/newatlas.com/biology/worlds-oldest-skin-reptile-dinosaur