Fossil may be 'missing link' from sea to land

Published on Wednesday 25 June 2008 23:23

A REMARKABLE fossil find might be the missing link that shows how our ancestors climbed out of the primordial swamps to live on land.

The well-preserved remains, unearthed from 370-million-year-old rocks in Latvia, has features in between those of fish and land animals.

The skull shape is that of an early tetrapod – four-legged vertebrates that mostly lived on land – but the rest of Ventastega curonica was clearly more suited to water.

The remains comprise a skull, braincase, shoulder girdle and partial pelvis, complete enough to allow a partial reconstruction and create a picture of what an animal from this crucial period looked like.

The process that transformed fins into limbs is poorly understood, despite being a key transition in evolution. Before tetrapods, vertebrates were confined to water.

It has long been accepted that all land animals with backbones – including humans – are descended from one small group of fish that left the water about 365 million years ago.

Professor Per Ahlberg, a palaeontologist, said of the find:

"The gap in our understanding of the evolutionary transition from fish to tetrapod is beginning to close."