Mar. 27,
2013 — Scientists who famously discovered the lobe-finned fish fossil
Tiktaalik roseae, a species with some of the clearest evidence of the
evolutionary transition from fish to limbed animals, have described another new
species of predatory fossil lobe-finned fish fish from the same time and place.
By describing more Devonian species, they're gaining a greater understanding of
the "fish-eat-fish world" that drove the evolution of limbed
vertebrates.
"We call
it a 'fish-eat-fish world,' an ecosystem where you really needed to escape
predation," said Dr. Ted Daeschler, describing life in the Devonian period
in what is now far-northern Canada
This was the
environment where the famous fossil fish species Tiktaalik roseaelived 375
million years ago. This lobe-finned fish, co-discovered by Daeschler, an
associate professor at Drexel University in the Department of Biodiversity,
Earth and Environmental Science, and associate curator and vice president of
the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, and his colleagues Dr.
Neil Shubin and Dr. Farish A. Jenkins, Jr., was first described
in Nature in 2006.This species received scientific and popular
acclaim for providing some of the clearest evidence of the evolutionary
transition from lobe-finned fish to limbed animals, or tetrapods.
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