Those atheist Darwinian bastards at the Tribune wrote:
Fossil fish sheds light on transition to living on land
NEW YORK -- Scientists have caught a fossil fish in the act of adapting toward a life on land, a discovery that sheds new light one of the greatest transformations in the history of animals.
Scientists have long known that fish evolved into the first creatures on land with four legs and backbones more than 365 million years ago, but they've had precious little fossil evidence to document how it happened.
The new find of several specimens looks more like a land-dweller than the few other fossil fish known from the transitional period, and researchers speculate that it may have taken brief excursions out of the water.
"It sort of blurs the distinction between fish and land-living animals," said one of its discoverers, paleontologist Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago.
Experts said the discovery, with its unusually well-preserved and complete skeletons, reveals significant new information about how the water-to-land evolution took place.
[...]
Some 375 million years ago, the creature looked like a cross between a fish and a crocodile. It swam in shallow, gently meandering streams in what was then a subtropical climate, researchers say. A meat-eater, it lived mostly in water.
Yet, its front fins had bones that correspond to a shoulder, upper arm, elbow, forearm and a primitive version of a wrist, Shubin said. From the shoulder to the wrist area, "it basically looks like a scale-covered arm," he said.
"Here's a creature that has a fin that can do push-ups," he said. "This is clearly an animal that is able to support itself on the ground," probably both in very shallow water and for brief excursions on dry land. On land, it apparently moved like a seal, he said.
It might have pulled itself onto stream banks, perhaps moving from one wet area to another, and even crawled across logs in swamps, said Daeschler.
[...]
Yet, the creature's jaws and snout were still very fishlike, showing that "evolution proceeds slowly; it proceeds in a mosaic pattern with some elements changing while others stay the same," Daeschler said.
If one considers adaptation as a process of collecting tools to live in a new environment, the new finding offers "a snapshot of the toolkit at this particular point in this evolutionary transition," Daeschler said.
NEW YORK -- Scientists have caught a fossil fish in the act of adapting toward a life on land, a discovery that sheds new light one of the greatest transformations in the history of animals.
Scientists have long known that fish evolved into the first creatures on land with four legs and backbones more than 365 million years ago, but they've had precious little fossil evidence to document how it happened.
The new find of several specimens looks more like a land-dweller than the few other fossil fish known from the transitional period, and researchers speculate that it may have taken brief excursions out of the water.
"It sort of blurs the distinction between fish and land-living animals," said one of its discoverers, paleontologist Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago.
Experts said the discovery, with its unusually well-preserved and complete skeletons, reveals significant new information about how the water-to-land evolution took place.
[...]
Some 375 million years ago, the creature looked like a cross between a fish and a crocodile. It swam in shallow, gently meandering streams in what was then a subtropical climate, researchers say. A meat-eater, it lived mostly in water.
Yet, its front fins had bones that correspond to a shoulder, upper arm, elbow, forearm and a primitive version of a wrist, Shubin said. From the shoulder to the wrist area, "it basically looks like a scale-covered arm," he said.
"Here's a creature that has a fin that can do push-ups," he said. "This is clearly an animal that is able to support itself on the ground," probably both in very shallow water and for brief excursions on dry land. On land, it apparently moved like a seal, he said.
It might have pulled itself onto stream banks, perhaps moving from one wet area to another, and even crawled across logs in swamps, said Daeschler.
[...]
Yet, the creature's jaws and snout were still very fishlike, showing that "evolution proceeds slowly; it proceeds in a mosaic pattern with some elements changing while others stay the same," Daeschler said.
If one considers adaptation as a process of collecting tools to live in a new environment, the new finding offers "a snapshot of the toolkit at this particular point in this evolutionary transition," Daeschler said.
