Ancient Fish Fossil May Rewrite Story of Animal Evolution

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

From National Geographic News:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/10/061018-fossil-fish.html

A fish that swam on an ancient barrier reef in Australia 380 million years ago had fins and nostrils remarkably similar to the limbs and ears of the first four-limbed creatures to walk on land, according to a new study.

[ivor]

Oh!  A transitional form!  I know a certain group of people that will be unhappy about that.   

[Opsa]

It's obviously a Toadfish!!!! :toadfish:

[Bluenose]

I saw a report about this last night, one of the key features of this fossil is that it is not crushed and remains in its original 3D comfiguration.  This allows a true investigation of the anatomy rather than largely having to infer it from flattened out remains as usually happens. 

Fascinating.

Bluenose

[Sibling Spoffish]

Well, how about that?

Now, everyone, say "Thank you Australia"...

[Bluenose]

Actually, this reminds of some work I did on behalf of Native Fish Australia to help out the Platypus Conservancy with some netting surveys that started a few years ago in Melbourne.  They needed people who could identify fish for them that were caught in their nets as part of their permit to net the Yarra River and its tributaries around the suburbs.  This was where I met Dr Melody Serena an American who had been over in Oz for some years studying Platypus.

I remember talking with her over a cup of coffee in the wee small hours and asking how she came to be iin Australia studying our animals.  She said that once she had qualified she had to make a choice of what she whould study and as she put it she could work on some minor points of clarification of well know species in North America, or she could come over here and study anything whe wanted for the simple reason that so little of our wildlife has been studied that it is all virtually green-fields in research terms.

To bring it back to this topic, the same only more so applies to our fossils.  Hardly anything at all has been studied because this is a big country and we don't have many paleontologists here to do the work.  This continent has some of the oldest sediments on Earth and can no doubt shed light on the earliest life forms and recently some very inportant finds have been made.  However, overall we have literally only just begun to scratch the surface, who knows what lies out here to find?

Bluenose