Teaching Fish to Walk

September 26, 2014 By: Erin Block

Recent research has demonstrated how the earliest tetrapod ancestors could have developed the ability to walk on land. Using bichir, a tropical freshwater fish that lives in Africa and is known to often walk on fins, the researchers raised juveniles on land. “The result illustrates the kinds of changes that might have enabled fins to become limbs when some fish traded water for land, around 400 million years ago.” Read more via Nature.