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Early tetrapods had an eye on the land

Fossil finds that can provide clues about how aquatic vertebrates evolved into land dwellers are elusive. But the ancient bones of a newly discovered species of tetrapod now provide some crucial missing evidence.
  1. Nadia B. Fröbisch

    1. Nadia B. Fröbisch is at the Natural History Museum, Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, 10115 Berlin, Germany.

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  2. Florian Witzmann

    1. Florian Witzmann is at the Natural History Museum, Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, 10115 Berlin, Germany.

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Following the scientific investigations into how vertebrates transitioned from water to land is like reading a good crime novel. We have a range of suspects, patchy evidence and a lot of unanswered questions. And to complicate matters, this transition from finned fish to four-limbed creatures (tetrapods) is a ‘cold case’ from nearly 400 million years ago. In a paper in Nature, Beznosov et al.1 present some compelling detective work that sheds light on this.

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Nature 574, 494-495 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03107-0

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 24 October 2019: The version of Figure 1 originally published was incorrect. This has now been corrected. The pdf version was correct.

References

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