Tiktaalik

A mold of the famous Tiktaalik fossil.

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Tiktaalik is an extinct genus of lobe-finned fish which lived around 375 million years ago.

Unlike modern fish, Tiktaalik had a neck, both gills and lungs, bones in its fins that resemble the bones in the upper arm, forearm and wrist of land vertebrates, and ribs that could support its body weight on dry land. Given its "neither-fish-nor-fowl" attributes, many scientists see Tiktaalik as a transitional form in the evolution of tetrapods (four-limbed vertebrates, i.e. amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals). Scientists call it "the most compelling examples yet of an animal that was at the cusp of the fish-tetrapod transition".

Na na na na na na, we can't hear you

Artist's depiction of Tiktaalik pulling itself out of a body of water.

“”What evolutionists fail to see however is that Tiktaalik is actually a fish, much as Archaeopteryx is a bird.

—Generic creationist response

Creationists claim that 397-million-year-old (compare to Tiktaalik's age of 375 million years) fossilized footprints found in Poland show that Tiktaalik could not reveal a transition between water and land animals. However, this argument is based on misunderstanding evolution as a linear progression. Augustine of Hippo's Great Chain of Being is fictional. There is no real reason why a primitive (i.e., resembling the ancestral) morphology could not survive to recent times (hey, coelacanth, how's it going?)

Plausible explanations for the 397 Ma fossils include:

• The fossils just aren't tetrapod footprints, but something else.
• The vertebrates made at least two transitions to land, not just one. The members of the transition represented by the Polish tracks all died, but Tiktaalik's descendants are modern tetrapods.
• Tiktaalik and kin have an as yet unknown fossil record which will put their common ancestor with tetrapods between that of tetrapods and lungfish.

Related fossils

The transition from water to land is bridged by several transitional fossils, ranging from amphibian-like fish to fish-like amphibians. One research article gives this list (with the caution that, like most things in evolution, there is no simple straight line):

• Eusthenopteron
• Panderichthys
• Tiktaalik
• Tulerpeton
• Elginerpeton
• Designathus
• Ventastega
• Metaxygnathus
• Acanthostega
• Ymeria
• Ichthyostega
• Hynerpeton
• Parmastega
• Watcheeria
• Pederpes - From smack in the middle of "Romer's Gap", where the tetrapod fossil record goes out to lunch for some 20 million years
• Greererpeton
• Crassigyrinus
• Baphetes
• Balanerpeton
• Denderpeton
• Silvanerpeton
• Proterogyrinus
• Eoherpeton
• Weslothiana
• Eucritta

External links

• A guide to early tetrapod evolution
• Here’s something else oppressing Ken Ham. He hates Tiktaalik