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Nothing So Wrong As Fish With Feet

Ugh. I hate fish with feet (if you want to hear the legendary snake fish story, go ask my mom), i don't care if they're part of the evolutionary process of our ancestors getting out of the primordial goo. It's just gross.

In 2006 the situation changed dramatically with the discovery of an almost perfectly intermediate fish-tetrapod, Tiktaalik, but even so a gap remained between this animal and the earliest true tetrapods (animals with limbs rather than paired fins). Now, new fossils of the extremely primitive tetrapod Ventastega from the Devonian of Latvia cast light on this key phase of the transition.
...
The recontructions made by Professor Ahlberg and Assistant Professor Henning Blom together with British and Latvian colleagues show that Ventastega was more fish-like than any of its contemporaries, such as Acanthostega. The shape of its skull, and the pattern of teeth in its jaws, are neatly intermediate between those of Tiktaalik and Acanthostega.

"However, the shoulder girdle and pelvis are almost identical to those of Acanthostega, and the shoulder girdle is quite different from that of Tiktaalik (the pelvis of Tiktaalik is unknown), suggesting that the transformation from paired fins to limbs had already occurred. It appears that different parts of the body evolved at different speeds during the transition from water to land", says Per Ahlberg.

*shudder*

By min | June 27, 2008, 1:58 PM | Science