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Evolutionary developmental biology

Dynasty of the plastic fish

Nature volume 513, pages 37–38 (2014)Cite this article

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Ambitious experimental and morphological studies of a modern fish show how developmental flexibility may have helped early 'fishapods' to make the transition from finned aquatic animals to tetrapods that walk on land. See Article p.54

Napoleon Bonaparte's military excursions into Egypt in 1798–99 led a young French naturalist, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, to cross paths with a strange fish that had paired lungs and could 'walk' on land on its stubby, lobe-like fins. In 1802, he dubbed this fish “Polyptère bichir”1, today known as the Nile bichir (Polypterus bichir). The bichir's melange of primitive and advanced traits helped to establish Geoffroy as a leading anatomist, embryologist and early evolutionary-development researcher of repute even today2. Now, on page 54 of this issue, Standen et al.3 focus on Polypterus in their own excursion under the 'evo-devo' flag that Geoffroy helped to raise. The authors suggest that the remarkable plasticity of the skeleton of Polypterus senegalus (the smaller West African relative of P. bichir) reveals a key part of the mechanism that might have facilitated the gradual transition of limbed vertebrates from water to land.

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Figure 1: Walk this way.

Antoine Morin

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Comparative Biomedical Sciences, John Hutchinson is in the Structure and Motion Laboratory, Royal Veterinary College, Hatfield AL9 7TA, UK.,

    John Hutchinson

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  1. John Hutchinson
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Correspondence to John Hutchinson.

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Hutchinson, J. Dynasty of the plastic fish. Nature 513, 37–38 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature13743

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