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Palaeontology

Fins made for walking

Nature volume 390, pages 21–22 (1997)Cite this article

One of the most enigmatic issues in vertebrate evolution is the fish-tetrapod transition — that period of evolutionary history when, some 365 million years ago, four-legged land animals first appeared in the fossil record. The transition was accompanied by radical innovation in limb structure such as the appearance of digits, and later (although we don't know exactly when) adaptations to habitual air breathing.

What were the causes and mechanisms of these changes? Such questions were matters of speculation until recently. Limbs capable of supporting an animal on land have been thought of as adaptations to terrestriality adopted by osteolepiform fish, the group from which tetrapods are thought to have arisen. But almost 40 years ago Romer1 wondered whether the fin-limb transition took place in water, independently of walking as such. A series of papers from Jennifer A. Clack and Michael I. Coates on the most primitive known tetrapod, the amphibian Acanthostega gunnari from the Upper Devonian of East Greenland, suggests that Romer was right. In a definitive study, published in The Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh2, Coates has gone further and set out the postcranial evidence and its implications for phylogeny and evolution.

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  1. the Palaeontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 117647, 123 Profsoyuznaya St, Russia

    Oleg A. Lebedev

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  1. Oleg A. Lebedev
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Lebedev, O. Fins made for walking. Nature 390, 21–22 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/36215

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