Giant fish fossil from 375 million years ago found

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RedFox

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NY Times

National Geographic page with artist's conception

On Ellsmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, they found a fossil of a fish 4 to 9 feet long from 375 million years ago. They called it Tiktaalik roseae. It has features of fish like scales and limbs intermediate between fish fins and tetrapod limbs. It has a flat skull attached to the neck, allowing it to move the head around out of the water. Fish move their head by moving their whole bodies. It has sharp teeth, which would be useful for getting the bugs already living on land.

What is now the Canadian Arctic used to be on the equator at the time of the fossil. This was before Pangea formed.

Check out this site and find the maps and globes from around 370 million years ago. They'll show that what is known now as North America was in the southern hemisphere and was passing over the Equator at the time of the fossil.

NY Times said:
In their journal report, the scientists concluded that Tiktaalik is an intermediate between the fish Panderichthys, which lived 385 million years ago, and early tetrapods. The known early tetrapods are Acanthostega and Ichthyostega, about 365 million years ago.

Tiktaalik, Dr. Shubin said, is "both fish and tetrapod, which we sometimes call a fishapod."
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That rules! I wish the drawing showed the whole creature and not just the front end, though.

Here are Panderichthys, Acanthostega, and Ichthyostega for comparison...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Finny_original.svg , http://www.marcboulay.net/sculptures/Album dinosaures/slides/panderichthys.jpg (Panderichthys)

http://tolweb.org/tree/ToLimages/04_Acan_flesh_reconstruct.JPG (Acanthostega model)

http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Galaxy/8152/PALEOBOOKBURPEEAMPHIBIAN2.JPG (Ichthyostega model)

BTW...in this quote from the article: did this scientist misspeak as to what species he named? I thought the Archaeopteryx showed the transition between lizard and bird!

Dr. Novacek responded in an interview: "We've got Archaeopteryx, an early whale that lived on land and now this animal showing the transition from fish to tetrapod. What more do we need from the fossil record to show that the creationists are flatly wrong?"
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That rules! I wish the drawing showed the whole creature and not just the front end, though.
Click to expand...

When you see that picture... click on "Enlarge Photo" it will shows the whole drawing of the creature.

Quite very intresting to read. :)
 
Rose Immortal said:
That rules! I wish the drawing showed the whole creature and not just the front end, though.

Here are Panderichthys, Acanthostega, and Ichthyostega for comparison...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Finny_original.svg , http://www.marcboulay.net/sculptures/Album dinosaures/slides/panderichthys.jpg (Panderichthys)

http://tolweb.org/tree/ToLimages/04_Acan_flesh_reconstruct.JPG (Acanthostega model)

http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Galaxy/8152/PALEOBOOKBURPEEAMPHIBIAN2.JPG (Ichthyostega model)
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Thanks for those links.

BTW...in this quote from the article: did this scientist misspeak as to what species he named? I thought the Archaeopteryx showed the transition between lizard and bird!
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They were saying that the fossil they found is as important for the transition from water to land based life as the Archaeopteryx is for the transition between reptiles and birds and the whale ancestors are for the transition from land to water based life.
 
Rose Immortal said:
The back end kind of fades, though...
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They gave a length of 4 to 9 feet. I guess they didn't find all of the tail bones, so they could only give a range for that part and showed it as fading in the picture.
 
long time ago there! That creature sure is odd looking and it sounds huge!
 
wow, interesting but I would like to have a question for you.

I'm sure that you know from several threads here that Christians beleives the earth is 6,000 years old but scientist confirmed that the fossils come from million years old...

:confused:
 
Some Christians believe that, Liebling. Others are just fine with science...I don't see any reason why God couldn't have created over billions of years. He IS omnipotent, after all. ;)

RedFox...I see what that sentence means now. Funny how one little comma placement can totally screw up the meaning if I don't hear it spoken out loud. ;)

And those are cool pics of the fossils! Thanks! :D
 
Very cool!

The only thing I don't like about the way this article is written is this:

In short, fishapod adds one more brick, and an especially important one, to the edifice of Darwinian evolution—and at the same time puts the so-called theory of intelligent design into even greater question than it already faces. That would be true if only because any designer who deliberately made such a queer fish would have been more of a practical joker than anything else. But it also demonstrates that while evolution has plenty of missing bits of evidence, they keep showing up all the time to strengthen it. Evolution is, as ID supporters love to say, "just" a theory. It also happens to be one of the most successful scientific theories in history, whose predictions of what should be found in the fossil record have been proven out… for the zillionth time.
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What I don't like is that this suggests that just because there's evolution that there cannot be a God.

It totally ignores the idea of "theistic evolution" which is supported by the Catholic Church and is NOT the same thing as "Intelligent Design" (i.e. creation science). Instead, it accepts both the science AND theology.

Besides...I think sometimes, in a kind-spirited way, God IS a practical joker. Just take a look at the platypus. ;)
 
Here, there are now a picture of a model of the fishapod and a diagram showing the details of its limb bones as well as the bones of the fins and legs of animals that came before and after the fishapod.

Yeah, I know that some people like the theistic evolution idea.
 
That's pretty cool. I especially liked the diagram that showed the bone structures of the fins/feet. As for how those back legs occurred, I would guess at some point the genetic coding for the front ones got duplicated in a good way?
 
Looks sort of a salamder (sp) , only bigger and monsterous.
 
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