Word: lungfish
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Together, these fossils have overturned the old picture of the fish-tetrapod transition, which conjured up the image of creatures like the modern lungfish crawling out of water onto land. That picture certainly didn't fit Acanthostega, whose short, flimsy legs were ill equipped for terrestrial locomotion. Rather, according to University of Cambridge paleontologist Jennifer Clack, Acanthostega was an aquatic creature that used its limbs and lungs to make a living in water. And that scenario makes sense because it sets up conditions for natural selection--the force that powers evolution--to favor transitional life-forms like the fishapod, with...
...that acts like a switch. Fish have a version of that switch too. For example, Zebrafish (ray-finned fish that split off from the lineage that led to lobe-fins early in the Devonian) have only part of the sequence, whereas coelacanths (lobe-fins closely related to lungfish) have a lot more of it. And the fishapod, presumably, had even more...
...Duboule and his colleagues studied "the wrong fish." Zebrafish are prolific and easy to raise under laboratory conditions, but they are advanced in evolutionary terms. A study of more primitive sea life, such as sharks or sturgeon, might yield greater amounts of evolutionary information; even better subjects would be lungfish and coelacanths, mysterious, nearly extinct creatures that lurk in the ocean depths and are the living fish closest to the fishlike ancestors of four-legged animals...
...Anecdote Man" (or, at least, I call him Anecdote Man). Anecdote Man was already laying out plans in his head for his 40-minute segment: "I'll start with an exhaustive 30-second account of the history of baseball, then sprinkle in a little evolutionary history of the lungfish, then mention some arcane astronomical instrument in one of those unknown churches in the French countryside, and then give them all my two cents on Foucault. They'll be wowed, again. I know as much trivia as Cliff Clavin...
...leave. These plays, whose "reality" is rooted not in life but in prior plays, movies and TV, shy away from the raw emotions of fear and grief and the harsh facts of the body's decline, trivializing the eternal mystery they pretend to revere. What makes Wrong Turn at Lungfish more than usually disappointing is that most such plays don't have George C. Scott (although last season's revival of the similarly smarmy On Borrowed Time did), and most are not written by Hollywood veterans whose creative credits number Pretty Woman, City Slickers and A League of Their...