“For the first time, Americans have the chance to meet an ancient ancestor. Lucy, the famous 3.2-million-year-old, human-like fossil from Ethiopia, is here on tour.
For the next six years, you can visit her at museums across the country and stare into the mirror of your own past. But in Your Inner Fish, Neil Shubin describes a fossil named Tiktaalik that makes Lucy’s time on Earth seem like just yesterday.
At 375 million years old, Tiktaalik (which means “large freshwater fish” in Inuit) sports a curious mix of features that mark it as an evolutionary milestone, a “beautiful intermediate between fish and land-living animals.” In its fossilized bones, we see a flat head and body, a functional neck and other features that presage what’s to come, all mixed in with fish features like fins and scales. Most surprising of all, Tiktaalik has a wrist joint.
“Bend your wrist back and forth,” Shubin instructs his readers. “Open and close your hand. When you do this, you are using joints that first appeared in the fins of fish like Tiktaalik.” Read the review at the Washington Post.
