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Palaeontology

A firm step from water to land

Nature volume 440, pages 748–749 (2006)Cite this article

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. Much of the importance of transitional fossils actually lies in how they resemble and differ from their nearest neighbours in the phylogenetic tree, and in the picture of change that emerges from this pattern.

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Figure 1: Tiktaalik in context.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. the Department of Physiology and Developmental Biology, Uppsala University, Norbyvägen 18A, Uppsala, 752 36, Sweden

    Per Erik Ahlberg

  2. the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EJ, UK

    Jennifer A. Clack

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  1. Per Erik Ahlberg
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  2. Jennifer A. Clack
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Ahlberg, P., Clack, J. A firm step from water to land. Nature 440, 748–749 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/440747a

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