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Nature 440, 747-749 (6 April 2006) | doi:10.1038/440747a; Published online 5 April 2006
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Palaeontology: A firm step from water to land
Per Erik Ahlberg1 & Jennifer A. Clack2
Abstract
A project designed to discover fossils that illuminate the transition between fishes and land vertebrates has delivered the goods. At a stroke, our picture of that transition is greatly improved.
The concept of 'missing links' has a powerful grasp on the imagination: the rare transitional fossils that apparently capture the origins of major groups of organisms are uniquely evocative. But the concept has become freighted with unfounded notions of evolutionary 'progress' and with a mistaken emphasis on the single intermediate fossil as the key to understanding evolutionary transitions.
- Per Erik Ahlberg is in the Department of Physiology and Developmental Biology, Uppsala University, Norbyvägen 18A, 752 36 Uppsala, Sweden.
Email: per.ahlberg@ebc.uu.se - Jennifer A. Clack is in the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EJ, UK.
Email: jac18@hermes.cam.ac.uk
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