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Published online 18 January 2006 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news060116-8
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Our ears once breathed
Fossil evidence points to origin of hearing apparatus.
Our ears could have started evolutionary life as a tube for breathing, say scientists, after examining the ancestral structure in a 370-million-year-old fossil fish.
Evolutionary biologists are intrigued by how complicated sensory organs evolved from structures that may have had completely different uses in ancestral creatures.
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