Saturday, March 10, 2018

My favorite fossil. An ancient species of fish, the ancestor of all land animals including human apes.

Tiktaalik








Neil Shubin and his team did research to figure out where to find a fossil like this. The research showed they should look for it on a remote Canadian island which has rocks about 375 years old. They were right. A fantastic achievement.

Wikipedia - Tiktaalik

Tiktaalik /tɪkˈtɑːlɪk/ is a monospecific genus of extinct sarcopterygian (lobe-finned fish) from the late Devonian period, about 375 MYA (million years ago), having many features akin to those of tetrapods (four-legged animals).[1]

Tiktaalik has a possibility of being a representative of the evolutionary transition from fish to amphibians. It is an example from several lines of ancient sarcopterygian fish developing adaptations to the oxygen-poor shallow-water habitats of its time, environmental conditions which are thought to have led to the evolution of tetrapods.[2]

It and similar animals may possibly be the common ancestors of the broad swath of all vertebrate terrestrial fauna: amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.[3] The first well-preserved Tiktaalik fossils were found in 2004 on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada.


Restoration

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