Roger Smith, left, and Neil Shubin examine a fossil.
By Chris Mooney
But the Darwin fish (click here) isn't merely a clever joke; in effect, it contains a testable scientific prediction. If evolution is true, and if life on Earth originated in water, then there must have once been fish species possessing primitive limbs, which enabled them to spend some part of their lives on land. And these species, in turn, must be the ancestors of four-limbed, land-living vertebrates like us.
Gill slits, right?
Sure enough, in 2004, scientists found one of those transitional species: Tiktaalik roseae, a 375-million-year-old Devonian period
specimen discovered in the Canadian Arctic by paleontologist Neil
Shubin and his colleagues. Tiktaalik, explains Shubin on the latest
episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, is an "anatomical mix between fish and a land-living animal."...
