Strange Ancient Fish Had Front And Back Legs

Live Science

This 375-million-year-old fish, the closest known relative of the ancestors of limbed animals such as humans, likely evolved the foundation for rear legs even before the move to land, researchers say.

Transcript

00:00 [Music]

00:16 And the name of this missing link is Titalic roseae.

00:20 It means large, shallow water fish in the Nunavut language of northern Canada.

00:25 The fossilised bones of Titalic show just how much it is a missing link between fish and animals.

00:31 It had scales and fins like a fish, but its bones are very similar to ours of our bodies today.

00:37 This is the shoulder bone and you can see the socket where the arm fitted in.

00:42 This, although it's short and stubby, is the humerus, the bone of the upper arm here.

00:48 These two are the radius and ulna, the two bones of the lower arm.

00:52 There are wrist bones here, but instead of fingers, because it not yet evolved properly,

00:57 there are rays like the fins of a fish.

01:00 It's one of those fossils that shows us a stage where we've acquired some of the features of a major group,

01:07 but not all of them.

01:08 So in a sense it's equivalent to that proto-bird called Archaeopteryx,

01:14 which has got some features of reptiles.

01:18 It's got a long tail, it's got teeth and so on.

01:20 But it's also got feathers and wings, so it's got bird features as well.

01:24 So it's that kind of combination of characters.

01:27 [Music plays]

01:31 [Music plays]

01:37 [BLANK_AUDIO]

Category

Transcript

Be the first to comment

Recommended