A cool fossil fish find.
Researchers think it may have looked something like this:'It sort of blurs the distinction between fish and land-living animals,'' said one of its discoverers, paleontologist Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago.
Experts said the discovery, with its unusually well-preserved and complete skeletons, reveals significant new information about how the water-to-land evolution took place.
''It's an important new contribution to (understanding) a very, very important transition in the history of life,'' said Robert Carroll of McGill University in Montreal.
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The back of its head also had features like those of land-dwellers. It probably had lungs as well as gills, and it had overlapping ribs that could be used to support the body against gravity, Shubin said.
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Yet, the creature's jaws and snout were still very fishlike, showing that ''evolution proceeds slowly; it proceeds in a mosaic pattern with some elements changing while others stay the same,'' Daeschler said.