Meet Qikiqtania, a fossil fish with the good sense to stay in the water

One group of fishes left the water millions of years ago. Many thousands of species including salamanders, birds, lizards, and mammals were part of these animals. The legacy of the water-to-land transition is shared by human beings and their ancestors.

They might have turned back instead of going onto the shore. What if the animals had left the water and gone back to live in more open waters?

One fish may have done that according to a new fossil. The newly discovered creature had fins that were built for swimming, unlike other animals that used their fins to prop their bodies up on the bottom of the water.

Qikiqtania fossil.">

I was a member of Neil Shubin's lab when I was at the University of Chicago. I was working with another researcher to process a fossil that was collected in 2004.

The jaws and teeth were visible from the surface of the rock. There were patches of scales with different colors. We could see that the fossil was an early one. We wanted to look inside.

We used a technology calledCT scanning, which shoots X-rays through the specimen, to look for anything that could be out of sight. We scanned a piece of rock that had a few scales on top and found a fin buried inside. Our jaws fell down. The lab and campus were closed a few days later.

The fin revealed

This is a very special fin. Scientists can get clues into how early tetrapods evolved and how they lived hundreds of millions of years ago. We can use the shape of certain bones in the skeleton to make predictions about an animal's behavior.

We needed to see the skeleton in high resolution after the initial scans. The professor in the department of the geophysics helped us trim the block using a rock saw. The block was made more fin, less rock, and allowed for a better look at the fin.

After analyzing data on the jaws, scales, and fin, we realized that this animal was a new species. The creature with fingers and toes is one of the closest relatives to limbed vertebrates.

It was called Qikiqtania wakei. The traditional name for the region where the fossil was found is Qikiqtaaluk, which means "kick-Kiq-tani-ahh" in the Inuktitut. Hundreds of millions of years ago, this was a warm place with rivers and streams. David Wake was a scientist and mentor who inspired a lot of us in the field of evolutionary and developmental biology.