At first, Ted Daeschler thought the fossil was just a fragment of a lungfish snout – interesting, but not earth-shaking. He and his colleagues were after bigger quarry. They had come to Ellesmere Island, high in the Canadian Arctic, in search of the fish that first dragged itself out of water nearly 400 million years ago, the evolutionary forebear to all land vertebrates – and, as such, our own very distant ancestor.
Daeschler carefully packed up the fragment and set it aside to study another day. It sat for months in a drawer at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, until one day a graduate student, Matt Friedman, happened to look at it and notice some unusual features. He showed it to Daeschler. “It was like light bulbs going off,” Daeschler recalls. “This is what we’re looking for. Of course it is!”
It was like light bulbs going off. This is what we’re looking for. Of course it is!
That unassuming fragment of bone helped lead Daeschler and his colleagues, Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago and Farish Jenkins of Harvard University, to one of the most important fossil finds of the decade: several specimens of an almost perfect intermediate between fish and land vertebrates, or tetrapods. All are so beautifully preserved that the researchers could see almost every detail of their skeleton. The new creature, which they named Tiktaalik – from the Inuit name for a large, shallow-water fish – gives us …