Word: shubin
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...shaped bone turned out to be the lower jaw of a fish, but not any fish Neil Shubin had ever seen. The University of Chicago paleontologist had been chipping his way through an ancient rock formation in an icy drizzle near Bird Fjord on Canada's Ellesmere Island last July when one of his colleagues pointed to a wall of red siltstone and exclaimed, "What's that...
...That, as Shubin and his colleagues reported last week in a pair of articles in Nature, was part of a creature that grew to at least 9 ft. in length and lived some 375 million years ago, just at the point in evolutionary history when fish were giving rise to the four-legged animals known as tetrapods. And indeed, the creature was a little of each, for along with a fish's scales, fangs and gills, it had anatomical features usually found only in animals that spend at least some of their time on land. It is, in short, exactly...
...will be hard to explain away the "fishapod," as Shubin and his team nicknamed their find. Unlike a true fish, it had a broad skull, a flexible neck, and eyes mounted on the top of its head like a crocodile. It also had a big, interlocking rib cage, suggesting that it had lungs and did at least part of its breathing through them, as well as a trunk strong enough to support itself in the shallows or on land. And most startling of all, when technicians dissected its pectoral fins, they found the beginnings of a tetrapod hand, complete with...
...land, observes Shubin's collaborator Ted Daeschler, chair of vertebrate zoology at Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences, such an appendage would have been worse than useless. But it would have been more than adequate for propping the animal's head above the water so that it could survey its surroundings or for anchoring it underwater as it waited to ambush its prey. The advantage of being able to gulp air through lungs as well as gills would likewise have been immediate, given that the fishapod made its home in warm, shallow waters that were frequently rendered inhospitable by decaying...
...This article consists of a complex illustration. Please see hardcopy of magazine.] Source: Neil Shubin, University of Chicago 380 million years ago BEFORE TIKTAALIK Lobe-finned fish had forelimbs suitable for moving in water but not on land 375 million years ago TIKTAALIK The forelimbs had the beginnings of fingers and a wrist, wrapped inside a fin 360 million years ago AFTER TIKTAALIK Tetrapod forelimbs have wrists and digits used for crawling on land [This article consists of a complex illustration. Please see hardcopy of magazine...