Strange Ancient Fish Had Front And Back Legs
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.
Category
🤖
TechTranscript
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 has not yet evolved properly,
00:57there are rays like the fins of a fish. It's one of those fossils that shows us a stage
01:04where we've acquired some of the features of a major group, but not all of them. So
01:08in a sense it'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.