Tiktaalik FTW!

[stromboli]

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/04/neil-shubin-inquiring-minds-tiktaalik-creationist-nightmare

We all know the Darwin fish, the car-bumper send-up of the Christian "ichthys" symbol, or Jesus fish. Unlike the Christian symbol, the Darwin fish has, you know, legs. Har har.

But the Darwin fish isn't merely a clever joke; in effect, it contains a testable scientific prediction. If evolution is true, and if life on Earth originated in water, then there must have once been fish species possessing primitive limbs, which enabled them to spend some part of their lives on land. And these species, in turn, must be the ancestors of four-limbed, land-living vertebrates like us.

Sure enough, in 2004, scientists found one of those transitional species: Tiktaalik roseae, a 375 million-year-old Devonian period specimen discovered in the Canadian Arctic by paleontologist Neil Shubin and his colleagues. Tiktaalik, explains Shubin on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, is an "anatomical mix between fish and a land-living animal."

"It has a neck," says Shubin, a professor at the University of Chicago. "No fish has a neck. And you know what? When you look inside the fin, and you take off those fin rays, you find an upper arm bone, a forearm, and a wrist." Tiktaalik, Shubin has observed, was a fish capable of doing a push-up. It had both lungs and gills. In sum, it's quite the transitional form.

Shubin's bestselling book about his discovery, Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, uses the example of Tiktaalik and other evolutionary evidence to trace how our own bodies share similar structures not only with close relatives like chimpanzees or orangutans, but indeed, with far more distant relatives like fish. Think of it as an extensive unpacking of a famous line by Charles Darwin from his book, The Descent of Man: "Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."
And now, PBS has adapted Your Inner Fish as a three-part series (you can watch the first installment here), using the irrepressible Shubin as a narrator who romps from Pennsylvania roadsides to the melting Arctic in search of fossils that elucidate the natural history of our own anatomy.

"Many of the muscles and nerves and bones I'm using to talk to you with right now, and many of the muscles and nerves and bones you're using to hear me with right now, correspond to gill structures in fish," explained Shubin on Inquiring Minds. Indeed, despite having diverged from fish several hundred million of years ago, we still share more than half of our DNA with them, according to Shubin.

And so on. Take that, Creationists! "Your Inner Fish" is a 3 parter playing on PBS right now. Neil Shubin is definitely on my list. Haven't read the book, but I will

[Solitary]

  Tiktaalik, a species of extinct sarcopterygian fish, is classified as having lived during the late Devonian period. Using evolutionary dating methods, it is dated to have lived around 375 million years ago. It is assumed by evolutionists to be the missing link between fish and tetrapods, supposedly closing a gap between the Panderichthys and the Acanthostega;[1] it was even dubbed "fishapod" by one of its discoverers, Neil Shubin. The Tiktaalik was discovered on Ellesmere Island on April 6, 2006.

Characteristics

The specimen found consisted of a skull and several bone fragments, namely, the shoulder, wrist, and fin, among others. According to evolutionists, the Tiktaalik was an intermediate form between sea and land animals. This conclusion was reached because of Tiktaalik's similarities to both fish and tetrapods. For instance, it is assumed to have had the scales and gills of a fish and yet also to have had tetrapod limbs and lungs, as well as a mobile neck. Its alleged half-fish and half-tetrapod characteristics included limb bones and joints which resembled those of a tetrapod but had fins rather than toes on the "feet".

For all these features, however, it is clear that Tiktaalik was simply a fish; its lobed fins appear better suited for swimming in water rather than crawling on land, and other fish, such as the Coelacanth, were also thought to be "missing links" until they were discovered to be some form of fish. The fins were not connected to the main skeleton so it does not bear the weight of the animal on the ground. It has been placed by evolutionists alongside Archaeopteryx, but they fail to see that neither animal was a transitional form; archaeopteryx was a full bird, tiktaalik was a full fish.

I give up! Solitary

[stromboli]

Can you say shoulders?

"However, the proximal series can be directly compared to the ulnare and intermedium of tetrapods. The fin was clearly weight bearing, being attached to a massive shoulder with expanded scapular and coracoid elements and attached to the body armor, large muscular scars on the ventral surface of the humerus, and highly mobile distal joints. The bones of the fore fins show large muscle facets, suggesting that the fin was both muscular and had the ability to flex like a wrist joint. These wrist-like features would have helped anchor the creature to the bottom in fast moving current.[5][6]

Also notable are the spiracles on the top of the head, which suggest the creature had primitive lungs as well as gills. This would have been useful in shallow water, where higher water temperature would lower oxygen content. This development may have led to the evolution of a more robust ribcage, a key evolutionary trait of land living creatures.[2] The more robust ribcage of Tiktaalik would have helped support the animal’s body any time it ventured outside a fully aquatic habitat. Tiktaalik also lacked a characteristic that most fishes haveâ€"bony plates in the gill area that restrict lateral head movement. This makes Tiktaalik the earliest known fish to have a neck, with the pectoral girdle separate from the skull. This would give the creature more freedom in hunting prey either on land or in the shallows."

[PickelledEggs]

( yes i know that's not a tiktaalik)

[stromboli]

But it's CUUTE!

[ApostateLois]

Tiktaalik looks exactly like something that would lurk at the bottom of a creek, hidden in the mud, and snap at your ankles as you wade in the water.