If our great grandmother Lucy was the bridge between non-hominins and hominins, Tiktaalik was that extraordinary life that acted as the connection between fishes and four-legged animals. I know it’s not easy to digest that we had fish as our common ancestor!
On the one hand, it was a fish with scales and fins. Unlike the other fishes, Tiktaalik’s fins had bones (corresponds to an upper arm, forearm and wrist) that could enable them to come out from the water and walk. And it had lungs and grills. Above all, Tiktaalik was a fish with a neck.
In his book, the Inner Fish, Neil Shubin, the American palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist, narrates the journey to unearth nature’s best-kept secret for a long time (about 375 million years!) – discovering the missing transitional piece from the life in water to life on land. The possibility of transitional creatures was something Charles Darwin had predicted some 130 years before!
Lucy: wiki
Tiktaalik: wiki
How fins became limbs: nature
A Devonian tetrapod-like fish and the evolution of the tetrapod body plan: nature
