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  • 7 weeks ago
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
00:00Music
00:16And the name of this missing link is Titalik rosei.
00:20It means large, shallow water fish in the Nunavut language of northern Canada.
00:25The fossilised bones of Titalik show just how much it is a missing link between fish and animals.
00:31It had scales and fins like a fish, but its bones are very similar to ours of our bodies today.
00:37This is the shoulder bone, and you can see the socket where the arm fitted in.
00:42This, although it's short and stubby, is the humerus, the bone of the upper arm here.
00:48These two are the radius and ulna, the two bones of the lower arm.
00:52There are wrist bones here, but instead of fingers, because it not yet evolved properly,
00:57there are rays like the fins of a fish.
01:00It's one of those fossils that shows us a stage where we've acquired some of the features of a major group,
01:07but not all of them.
01:08So, in a sense, it's equivalent to that proto-bird called Archaeopteryx,
01:14which has got some features of reptiles. It's got a long tail, it's got teeth and so on.
01:20But it's also got feathers and wings, so it's got bird features as well.
01:24So, it's that kind of combination of characters.
01:28So, we can see it around the corner.
01:35So, we're going to hold a little bit smaller.
01:36But there's a lot more times if we have a few different ideas.
01:40We can imagine how we can match the process of an inch with a large one,
01:42and we can imagine how we have a sort of a tiny bunch of ones.
01:44So, we're going to be able to watch our original image.
01:45The blue line, the pink line and the black line, the black line, the white line.
01:47So, we can see those where we have a group of monsters.
01:49The black line of white line is a beautiful thing.
01:51So, we can see how we can see the race.
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