Far reaching fossil find.


NY Times today 6/4/2006.
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In two reports today in the journal Nature, a team of scientists led by Neil H. Shubin of the University of
Chicago say they have uncovered several well-preserved skeletons of the fossil fish in sediments of former
streambeds in the Canadian Arctic, 600 miles from the North Pole.

The skeletons have the fins, scales and other attributes of a giant fish, four to nine feet long. But on
closer examination, the scientists found telling anatomical traits of a transitional creature, a fish that is
still a fish but has changes that anticipate the emergence of land animals - and is thus a predecessor of
amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs, mammals and eventually humans.

In the fishes' forward fins, the scientists found evidence of limbs in the making. There are the beginnings of
digits, proto-wrists, elbows and shoulders. The fish also had a flat skull resembling a crocodile's, a neck,
ribs and other parts that were similar to four-legged land animals known as tetrapods.

Other scientists said that in addition to confirming elements of a major transition in evolution, the fossils
were a powerful rebuttal to religious creationists, who have long argued that the absence of such transitional
creatures are a serious weakness in Darwin's theory.

The discovery team called the fossils the most compelling examples yet of an animal that was at the cusp of
the fish-tetrapod transition. The fish has been named Tiktaalik roseae, at the suggestion of elders of
Canada's Nunavut Territory. Tiktaalik (pronounced tic-TAH-lick) means "large shallow water fish."

Two other paleontologists, commenting on the find in a separate article in the journal, said that a few other
transitional fish had been previously discovered from approximately the same Late Devonian time period, 385
million to 359 million years ago. But Tiktaalik is so clearly an intermediate "link between fishes and land
vertebrates," they said, that it "might in time become as much an evolutionary icon as the proto-bird
Archaeopteryx," which bridged the gap between reptile




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