Holy Darwin fish! Those four-legged swimmers you see on the back of Subarus and other progressive cars -- they aren't just for mocking the Creationists anymore. They're now the stuff of science, per a new discovery of a 375-million-year old fossil.
And if you haven't heard about it yet, you will soon - it was on PBS's NewsHour and it's already in Time magazine.
Per an article in today's New York Times.
Scientists have discovered fossils of a 375-million-year-old fish, a large scaly creature not seen before, that they say is a long-sought missing link in the evolution of some fishes from water to a life walking on four limbs on land.
Actually, if I were to do this right, I'd start with the reaction (again, the NY Times):
In an interview, Dr. Shubin, an evolutionary biologist, let himself go. "It's a really amazing, remarkable intermediate fossil," he said. "It's like, holy cow."
Now, let's backtrack to the reason.
Found in the Canadian Artic not far from the North Pole, the fossil shows a fish with a flat croc-like head and evidence of limbs for walking on land. The NY Times reports: "The discovery team called the fossils the most compelling examples yet of an animal that was at the cusp of the fish-tetrapod transition. "
The coolest photo (and a good article entitled "A Fish with Fingers?") is here from Time magazine which named the creature a "Fishapod".
More cool photos on the cover of Nature magazine, captioned "The Fish that Crawled from the Sea."
Speaking of retrospectives, if you never saw the famous Guinness TV ad on Evolution -- which starts at a present-day pub and fast-backwards through 400 million years of evolution to end up with a legged fish in a primeval pond wishing for a pint of Stout -- check it out. It used to be on the Guinness site, but here's the only place with a (grainy) copy.
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UPDATE: 'Course, if you thought this would put an end to the Evolution-Creation debate, not even close. As HitnRun blogger Ronald Bailey says: "Look for creationists of all stripes to demand, "So where's the transition between eusthenopteron and tiktaalik, not to mention the transiton between tiktaalik and ichthyostega?" Essentially what they are requiring for proof of evolution are the fossils for every creature that ever lived because without them, there will always be a "missing link." Nevertheless, the discovery of tiktaalik forces their God into ever smaller gaps."
http://www.reason.com/hitandrun/2006/04/fishapod_confou.shtml#013315