The Mystery of Fins into Feet

Article: Fish DNA May Explain How Fins Turned into Feet 

Fish growing arms and legs and making their way onto land to establish a new environment to live in seems reminiscent of a really bad horror movie. However, such an occurrence is not as far fetched as it may seem. Life initially existed in the Ocean, after all, and it is from there that organisms gradually made their way onto land in the Paleozoic era.

Despite the certainty of such an event happening, scientists always welcome sure fire evidence that link one organism to another. The ‘colonization of land by fish’, as stated by the article, is something that researchers have been attempting to expand their knowledge on. To do this, they have been attempting to find a link between fish and land animals. One way in which they are doing this is by decrypting and examining the genome, an organism’s hereditary information, of fish—specifically, the coelacanth and lungfish. However, the coelacanth is the one of the two genomes which researchers can actually crack.

Through extensive research, they have been able to make viable connections with the coelacanth and land animals, such as the fact that they produce large eggs which hatch inside the body of the mother. Their fins, like lungfish, are noted to be ‘meaty’ and could have been used to walk on land in a previous time.

The cracking of such a mystery would be a good step to ‘reconstructing’ a major development of organisms on Earth. This is an exemplification of how science is able to propel us forward, and also take us back to the past. Further understanding how evolution works will no doubt prove to be useful in the future.