Comments on: Walking Towards Land

By: The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution | The Loom | Discover Magazine

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 05:54:59 +0000

[...] time in color. The picture here is one of the pieces he’s done for the book: a portrait of Tiktaalik, an ancient fish with feet-like [...]

By: The Shoulder Bone’s Connected to the Ear Bone… | The Loom | Discover Magazine

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 17:00:27 +0000

[...] old fish with a lot of tetrapod features, such as neck and a very leg-like fin. (See this Loom post on Tiktaalik for details.) Tiktaalik’s discoverers first published a description of the beast [...]

By: Word Salad on Clashing Culture | Tangled Up in Blue Guy

Word Salad on Clashing Culture | Tangled Up in Blue Guy — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 03:31:24 +0000

[...] of our ancestors from the water to land, known as Tiktaalik. I’ve written about Tiktaalik here, and you can get more details from the book Your Inner Fish, written by Neil Shubin, one of [...]

By: Missing The Wrist | The Loom | Discover Magazine

Missing The Wrist | The Loom | Discover Magazine — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:10:10 +0000

By: Dawn of the Picasso Fish | The Loom | Discover Magazine

Dawn of the Picasso Fish | The Loom | Discover Magazine — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:00:56 +0000

[...] and Heteronectes now join the transitional fossil hall of fame, along with a fish with limbs, Tiktaalik, and the limbed cousin of whales, Indohyus. They’re also a reminder that the argument, [...]

By: Emily Sommer

Emily Sommer — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 15:14:06 +0000

Wow, thats awesome. I had read about this somewhat in El Pais, but didn´t quite understand it all. Everytime we find another littl bit of the puzzle of how people and animals evolved its a big deal, in my opinion… if only so as to have yet another piece of evidence in support of science =)

By: macjim

macjim — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 10:56:12 +0000

Nice article and useful diagram, but the intro describing Tiktaalik as a “fossil fish with fingers” looks very wrong: as you point out later Acanthostega had lots of fingers, but Tiktaalik had spiny fins. After that bad start, a very interesting article. By the way, don’t forget to look at Wikipedia’s article on Tiktaalik.

By: Ocellated

Ocellated — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 19:26:40 +0000

A New Discovery For Science, The Same Old Spin For Intelligent Design

I imagine by now you heard of the new transitionary fossil reported from the artic circle, dubbed Tiktaalik roseae. (It’s pronounced tic-TAH-lick, and it’s just so fun to say!) MSNBC has the layman’s report, while Pharyngula and The L…

By: dolphin

dolphin — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 08:55:31 +0000

"At the Water's Edge" is really a great book and anyone who read it will be understand the importance of Tiktaalik. However, I'm deeply dismayed because of the ignorance the creationists show in Nature's newsblog. I guess the simple fact that they are going berserk shows how important this discovery is.

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 22:47:48 +0000

I think we should always be excited by any find like Tiktaalik. It is so unlikely that any particular organism should be fossilized to pass its story down to us across hundreds of millions of years that we should never lose the excitement.

Carl: I read At Water’s Edge last year and it was great. It wasn’t just a compendium of information, but a nested set of stories, one being that of the animals themselves and the other that of their discoverers. You conveyed the excitement of our emerging knowledge of the two great transitions of tetrapods and whales and it only heightens it to know that the stories aren’t yet over.

By: Martin Bennedik

Martin Bennedik — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 19:40:30 +0000

>Writing books about science is massive fun, but it is always followed by an unpleasant aftertaste, as you watch all your work become quaint and dated.

You should be glad you are not writing books about developing computer software Those books usually have to be updated every few years or so. I wonder if this is done with science books, too?

By: The Politburo Diktat

The Politburo Diktat — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 18:54:15 +0000

Tiktaalik roseae – Missing Link?

So says the headline of today’s New York Times. I hate that phrase “missing link.” Hate it, hate it, hate it. The phrase “missing link” indirectly gives ammunition to this guy, who writes:
Long-sought missing link. Long s…

By: Critical Biomass

Critical Biomass — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 13:36:39 +0000

Egy kis l

By: Wodan

Wodan — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 13:04:12 +0000

Good that they have found the fossil, something you can see is always better then predictions and probabilities, no matter how certain these predictions are.

By: Adam

Adam — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 13:04:00 +0000

Hi Carl

Very cool find. Another ‘gap’ plugged – more or less. The more branches that we dig up in the fish-tetrapod transition, the more questions we end up with. Acanthostega, Ichthyostega, Eusphenopteron, Panderichthys have all spent time in the role of ‘gap-filler’, but of course that’s a bit too naive. What Tiktaalik represents is a few more fish-pieces re-arranged in the tetrapod direction, and perhaps more so than other wannabe ‘gap-fillers’.

Intermediates are amazing when found and usually not a close fit to what our theories expected them to be either. Wonder what puzzles ‘Tiktaalik’ will throw our way?

By: Daylight Atheism

Daylight Atheism — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 03:07:17 +0000

Hello, Beautiful

(Note: The final post in the free will series will appear tomorrow.)
It has been a hundred and twenty-five years since Charles Darwin passed away, but his legacy is alive and well. The theory of evolution which he was first to propose has become the un…

By: Todd Fox

Todd Fox — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 02:11:09 +0000

Do check out the cool VIDEO from the Univ of Chicago on this: http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/06/060405.tiktaalik-video.shtml

By: Khan

Khan — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 01:38:07 +0000

Acanthostega was wonderfully mind-blowing. For starters, it had eight fingers, rather than the standard five that everyone thought was the rule for tetrapods. It’s now clear that the developmental genes that controlled digit growth were not tightly locked into the five-fingered rule when tetrapods first evolved.
========================

We could have been hexadecimal?

By: Scott Belyea

Scott Belyea — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:22:38 +0000

I may be biased in that judgment, having spent half of my book At the Water’s Edge exploring that history. But judge for yourself.

Serendipity! I just finished reading “At The Water’s Edge” last weekend. Excellent book about fascinating discoveries, by the way … but everyone here already knew that, right?

So … I was more than a bit interested in the reports of Tiktaalik. My reaction was similar to yours; should this give rise to excitement or to a quiet feeling of “Well, of course …”?

The progress in clarifying this piece of the puzzle one bit at a time has been intriguing to observe. I’m a lay observer, but I can vicariously share in the intellectual satisfaction that I’m sure workers in the field feel.