Your Inner Fish/Tiktaalik Update

Tiktaalik illustration by National Science Foundation's Zina Deretsky

Earlier today we posted a brief review of Neil Shubin’s
Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, following three earlier excerpts from the text on The Hard Parts – Conodonts & Ostracoderms, on Why History Makes Us Sick and on the fascinating primitive tetrapod Tiktaalik.

For those who have read the book, or whose attention has been captivated by one or more of the excerpts mentioned, a number of recent and relatively recent reports have appeared in Science Daily which may well prove to be of further interest.

Just today, a report on recently published research by Shubin and colleagues appeared in the article Evolution of Fins and Limbs Linked With Gills. Additional and related information is available in the earlier New Genetic Data Overturn Long-held Theory Of Limb Development and in Scientists Discover Evolutionary Origin of Fins, Limbs. Other germane items may be found in Primordial Fish Had Rudimentary Fingers and Coelacanth Fossil Sheds Light On Fin-to-Limb Evolution.

Also of interest might be the National Science Foundation’s release New Fossils Fill the Evolutionary Gap Between Fish and Land Animals, from which the illustration above was derived.