The meme shows an ancient fish called Tiktaalik.
The green, eel-like creature crawled out of the sea about 350 million years ago, only to be directed to turn around and go back to the sea.
The joke is that the fish should crawl back into the water to escape the troubles of our modern times.
The study suggests that a relative of Tiktaalik did that.
The evolutionary series of fish had evolved to walk but this one wouldn't do it. Neil Shubin is a paleontologist at the University of Chicago who co-authored the study.
The team that discovered Tiktaalik was led by Shubin. While the team focused on Tiktaalik, the fossil was mostly un studied.
The new species is very close to the old one. Shubin said that they knew that by looking at all the features. It's a very close cousin of both Tiktaalik and creatures with arms and legs.
Shubin said that early tetrapods spent more and more time out of the water. Animals like Tiktaalik were able to survive on mudflats because of the arrangement of bones and joints in their fins.
Tom Stewart, an evolutionary Biologist at Penn State who also worked on the study, said that it was swimming in open water. Qikiqtania's fins are the result of its swimming ancestors coming back to the water.
He said that the pattern was an unexpected one. Before we had a fossil like this, that wouldn't have been predicted.
The study shows that animals weren't just evolving from water based fish to land based ones.
Shubin said that the transition from water to land was happening both ways.
There is a myth that evolution is a linear progression from one species to the next.
Stewart said that they were introduced to the idea of evolution through images like an ape that stood upright and produced a man. Evolution doesn't work in that way.
Shubin said evolution was described as a set of branching paths. Shubin said that evolution is a tree of creatures evolving in many different ways.
The meme will evolve from here.
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