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

00:00And the name of this missing link is Titalic rosei, it means large shallow water fish in

00:23the Nunavut language of northern Canada.

00:26The fossilised bones of Titalic show just how much it is a missing link between fish

00:30and animals. It had scales and fins like a fish, but its bones are very similar to ours

00:36of our bodies today. This is the shoulder bone and you can see the socket where the

00:40arm fitted in. This, although it's short and stubby, is the humerus, the bone of the

00:46upper arm here. These two are the radius and ulna, the two bones of the lower arm. There

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

00:57are rays like the fins of a fish. It's one of those fossils that shows us a stage where

01:04we've acquired some of the features of a major group, but not all of them. So in a sense

01:09it's equivalent to that proto-bird called Archaeopteryx, which has got some features

01:16of reptiles. It's got a long tail, it's got teeth and so on, but it's also got feathers

01:21and wings, so it's got bird features as well. So it's that kind of combination of characters.

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