Strange Ancient Fish Had Front And Back Legs

Live Science

This 375-million-year-old fish, the closest known relative of the ancestors of limbed animals such as humans, likely evolved the foundation for rear legs even before the move to land, researchers say.

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00:00 [Music]

00:16 And the name of this missing link is Titalic roseae.

00:20 It means large, shallow water fish in the Nunavut language of northern Canada.

00:25 The fossilised bones of Titalic show just how much it is a missing link between fish and animals.

00:31 It had scales and fins like a fish, but its bones are very similar to ours of our bodies today.

00:37 This is the shoulder bone and you can see the socket where the arm fitted in.

00:42 This, although it's short and stubby, is the humerus, the bone of the upper arm here.

00:48 These two are the radius and ulna, the two bones of the lower arm.

00:52 There are wrist bones here, but instead of fingers, because it not yet evolved properly,

00:57 there are rays like the fins of a fish.

01:00 It's one of those fossils that shows us a stage where we've acquired some of the features of a major group,

01:07 but not all of them.

01:08 So in a sense it's equivalent to that proto-bird called Archaeopteryx,

01:14 which has got some features of reptiles.

01:18 It's got a long tail, it's got teeth and so on.

01:20 But it's also got feathers and wings, so it's got bird features as well.

01:24 So it's that kind of combination of characters.

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