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