Fish sprouted fingers before they ventured onto land, fossil shows

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A 380-million-year-old fossil of a fish has revealed that fingers evolved in vertebrates before the creatures wriggled out of the sea and evolved into land-dwelling creatures, as a new study describes.

The fossil "clarifies the question about the transition between fish and four-legged animals," known as tetrapods, Cloutier told Live Science in an email. "It is the first time that digits, as seen in tetrapods, are found in a fin covered by scales and fin rays, as seen in fishes."

The discovery of the fossil, in Miguasha National Park in Quebec, took an entire team. Two tourists found different pieces of the tail, and Benoît Cantin, a Miguasha park warden-naturalist, found the majority of the fossil on the beach, which he excavated with Michel Haché and Philippe Duranleau Gagnon, both naturalist guides at the park.

This group of naturalists unearthed "the longest fossil ever found in the Escuminac Formation, less than 200 meters [656 feet] behind the [park's] museum," Cloutier said. This fossil was a prize: Although broken into 22 slabs of rock, it showed the most complete specimen of E. watsoni to date. 

Once the tail pieces found by the tourists were added, "it was the last piece of the puzzle to complete our unique, 1.57-meter-long specimen of Elpistostege, the only complete [fossil of a] elpistostegalian, or tetrapod-like fish, known on Earth," Cloutier said.

The researchers analyzed the fish via a high-energy CT (computed tomography) scan at The University of Texas at Austin, Cloutier said. This gave the team, composed of scientists from the University of Quebec in Rimouski and Flinders University in Australia, a digital image of the fossil that they could rotate, magnify and study.

The fish's front fins, known as pectoral fins, immediately caught the researchers' attention. These fins had precursors of vertebrate fingers and arms, including the humerus (arm), radius and ulna (forearm), rows of carpus (wrist), and phalanges organized in digits (fingers), the researchers said. It's these last, distal bones that the researchers described in the new study, published online Wednesday (March 18) in the journal Nature. 

After E. watsoni lived, fin rays and scales were lost in the pectoral appendages as tetrapods evolved further and eventually made it to land. Still, all tetrapods share the same basic pattern of digits found in E. watsoni, Cloutier said. 

Source: https://www.livescience.com/ancient-fish-fingers.html

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Elpistostege watsoni's first experience on the land, colorised:

 

[CautiousLurker 19,709]

This is really cool! Damn, they've been finding all sorts of things lately, I'm still hoping there's a full fossil of a megalodon somewhere out there, to settle what it actually looked like... and I know there have been pictures circulating online but people said that specimen  was probably fake so I'm not getting my hopes up yet...

 Also this makes me hopeful - if a fish was able to grow fingers, maybe one day I'll be able to grow a fishtale and become a merman 

[Delaney Elias 1,318]

Just now, CautiousLurker said:

 Also this makes me hopeful - if a fish was able to grow fingers, maybe one day I'll be able to grow a fishtale and become a merman 

Yas! 

[Diamond Monster 299]

but now what about chicken or the egg?