The Fish That Had Arms Inside Its Fins
Tiktaalik. It lived 375 million years ago, in warm shallow rivers during the Devonian period. And here's the thing I keep circling back to — it wasn't a fish. It also wasn't a lizard, or an amphibian, or anything that fits cleanly into a single category we use for living things today. It was something caught in between all of them, at the exact moment life on Earth first started working out how to leave the water and walk on land.
But before any of that — before the arms, before what it meant — there's a detail about how this fossil got found that changes the whole story. Because almost nothing else in paleontology was found the way Tiktaalik was.
Sources:
1. Daeschler, E.B., Shubin, N.H., Jenkins, F.A. Jr. "A Devonian tetrapod-like fish and the evolution of the tetrapod body plan." Nature 440: 757–763, 2006. [original naming/description, "fishapod" concept]
2. Shubin, N.H., Daeschler, E.B., Jenkins, F.A. Jr. "The pectoral fin of Tiktaalik roseae and the origin of the tetrapod limb." Nature 440: 764–771, 2006. [shoulder/elbow/wrist anatomy inside the fin]
3. Shubin, N.H., Daeschler, E.B., Jenkins, F.A. Jr. "Pelvic girdle and fin of Tiktaalik roseae." PNAS 111(3): 893–897, 2014. [2014 hip/pelvis discovery, front-first assumption overturned]
4. Shubin, N.H. Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body. Pantheon, 2008. [expedition narrative, Ellesmere Island search logic]
5. EurekAlert! / University of Chicago press release. "New Arctic fossils fill evolutionary gap between fish and limbed animals," April 2006. [Shubin/Daeschler/Jenkins quotes, "fishapod," discovery circumstances]
6. University of Chicago Medicine / ScienceDaily. "Discovery of new Tiktaalik roseae fossils reveals key link in evolution of hind limbs," Jan. 13, 2014.
7. UC Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) Newsletter. "Tiktaalik comes to UCMP," Brian Swartz. [2004 field season and discovery details]
8. CBC News. "Canadian Museum of Nature unveils ancient limbed fish fossil." [four-year search, discovery circumstances]
9. "Tiktaalik." Wikipedia.
10. Stewart, T.A., Lemberg, J.B., Daly, E., Daeschler, E.B., Shubin, N.H. "Fin ray patterns at the fin-to-limb transition in fossil elpistostegalians" / related work on *Qikiqtania wakei*. *PNAS*, 2022. [2022 discovery of Qikiqtania, evolutionary reversal toward water]
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