I spent a sizable chunk of this weekend reading Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin. I had assummed (when I bought it) to be a detailed account of the Tiktaalik story, to which I was familiar from Remarkable Creatures (a wonderful book, but to which I never got around to writing a review). Tiktaalik was a big story in 2008, whose fossils were then uncovered in Arctic. It's name literally means 'large freshwater fish', and it lived around 375 million years ago. What makes it distinct is the fact that it is major transitional form (so called missing link, which can now be considered found) between water and land dwelling animals. It shows features of both, e.g. it's a fish but with a neck, and it's fins show primitive hand like limbs. It has been described as 'the fish that could do pushups'. Neil Shubin was the leader of the team that made this discovery.
As I was saying, I was looking for a story, but the book offers more than that. It is a book about evolution without explicitly saying so. The main focus is on the unity of life, by reconnecting our bodies with our ancestors. These include fish, reptiles and even microbes. To quote an example, take the mammalian ear. One of the three bones that make the inner part is a repurposed (and reduced in size) jaw support bone found in Sharks. And the other two bones have been repurposed from the multi-boned-jaws of our reptillian ancestors (in process, giving us a jaw with a single bone). Take another example, our teeth. The machinery used to make them has been reused in making hairs and breasts. The book ranges over a wide variety of topics, including how embryos develop, when did we acquire color vision (about 55 million years ago) and why single celled creatures who had dominated the earth for billions of years started body-building (became multicellular) about a billon years ago (it was the rise in oxygen levels that allowed synthesis of large amount of colagen, the protein which holds bone tissues together), without getting dry and in a remarkably compact form. A fruitful and enjoyable read!
As I was saying, I was looking for a story, but the book offers more than that. It is a book about evolution without explicitly saying so. The main focus is on the unity of life, by reconnecting our bodies with our ancestors. These include fish, reptiles and even microbes. To quote an example, take the mammalian ear. One of the three bones that make the inner part is a repurposed (and reduced in size) jaw support bone found in Sharks. And the other two bones have been repurposed from the multi-boned-jaws of our reptillian ancestors (in process, giving us a jaw with a single bone). Take another example, our teeth. The machinery used to make them has been reused in making hairs and breasts. The book ranges over a wide variety of topics, including how embryos develop, when did we acquire color vision (about 55 million years ago) and why single celled creatures who had dominated the earth for billions of years started body-building (became multicellular) about a billon years ago (it was the rise in oxygen levels that allowed synthesis of large amount of colagen, the protein which holds bone tissues together), without getting dry and in a remarkably compact form. A fruitful and enjoyable read!
2 comments:
evolution...I like to hear stories..bt not read..no! so when's the story session? :)
hehe.. jab bi audience chahe..
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