Humans Are More Fishy Than You Might Think

I was browsing NPR.org this morning and came upon an interesting article: "The Human Edge: Finding Our Inner Fish." It turns out that, in addition to apes, fish played a vital role in the evolution of us humans as well. This isn't new news, but it ceases to fascinate me.

In 2004, Dr. Neil Shubin found the fossilized remains of a fish in the Canadian Arctic. According to the article,

Shubin says his find, which he named Tiktaalik, represents an important evolutionary step, because it has the structures that will ultimately become parts of our human bodies. Shoulders, elbows, legs, a neck, a wrist — they're all there in Tiktaalik.

I did a little more searching on Tiktaalik, and I discovered that the fossil is 375 million years old. Whoa! As stated on the University of Chicago's pages dedicated to Tiktaalik, the fossil also has ear notches and ribs. Further,

Tiktaalik looks like a cross between the primitive fish it lived amongst and the first four-legged animals [tetrapods, which we descended from] . . . the existence of tetrapod features on a fish like Tiktaalik is important because it marks the earliest appearance of these novel features in the fossil record.

This kind of stuff makes me want to be a scientist.