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.
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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.