Friday, April 07, 2006

Walking Fish Lends A Hand To Missing Evolutionary Link


Paleontologists have discovered fossils of a species that provides the missing evolutionary link between fish and the first animals that walked out of water onto land about 375 million years ago.

"This previously unknown, extinct animal represents the beginning of the emergence of fish onto land, and the evolutionary transformation of fins into limbs," says Farish A. Jenkins Jr., (in the pic) Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard and curator of mammalogy and vertebrate paleontology at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. "

This animal represents the transition from water to land - the part of history that includes ourselves. So this is an exciting scientific discovery of a fish that has been pulled out the muck.

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