Neil Shubin explains how they predicted the fish fossils they were looking for would be found at a remote Canadian island near the Arctic Circle. Their prediction was totally correct. This is how science works and I think it's fantastic.

The following questions were posed to Neil Shubin in April 2006, after the unveiling of the discovery of Tiktaalik roseae.

Q: What drew you to conduct research in this region?

A: The story behind us beginning to work in the Arctic, or discovering this area to work on, is actually interesting. We discovered these areas looking through an undergraduate geology textbook. I was having an argument with one of my colleagues, and we went through my undergraduate geology text and there is a figure in there. It shows where rocks from the age of 380 to 360 million years ago are exposed on the Earth. And there were three sites: one was in Eastern North America, which is where this person and I made lots of discoveries before; another was in Greenland, which is very famous for producing some of the earliest creatures to live on land; and there was a third. The third was in the Canadian Arctic, stretching from what is now Ellesmere Island all the way to the West, about 1500 km. It turned out that no one ever worked there before, except the geologists that mapped it. So after seeing that image in the textbook, we went out and tried to raise money, get the permits, and then ran a series of expeditions up there to find just the kind of creature we ended up discovering six years later. There were other paleontologists who had worked in this region in the past. Explorers, a Norwegian team around the turn of the century in the early 1900s worked up there. There were people interested in fossil plants who worked up there for a period of time. No one had gone up there to look for fossils of vertebrates, of fish and amphibians. We were the first team that I know of.