Tiktaalik had fins that were adapted for crawling on land Science History Images/Alamy
A CT scan of a fossil of Tiktaalik, one of the first fish to crawl on land, has revealed more features of its body that are intermediate between fish and land-dwelling animals. In particular, they show that its fins were becoming connected to its spine, a feature of limbs in land vertebrates, but not of fins in fish.
“That’s an unexpected result given the way we’ve reconstructed this animal in the past,” says Thomas Stewart at Pennsylvania State University.
Neil Shubin at the University of…
