Hi, I'm Tetsuto Miyashita. I'm a new Research Scientist at the Canadian Museum of Nature.
And this collection is the reason why I came to work for this museum. We house millions of natural objects, as specimens, in this national collection.
Each one of them is a precious piece of Canada's natural heritage and each one of those pieces
tells an important story of how we got here as a tiny branch in the massive tree of life.
Here in Paleobiology, we provide a temporary home to more than 5000 fossil specimens
that came from the territory of Nunavut, until one day in the future [when] these specimens all go home to Nunavut.
We also facilitate research by international experts. And today, I'd like to introduce you to the crown jewel of this Nunavut fossil collection.
I have here on screen Professor Neil Shubin from the University of Chicago. Professor Shubin is a best-selling author and host of the TV series Your Inner Fish
and that has everything to do with this important specimen that came from Nunavut.
(Tetsuto) Neil, can you tell me what specimen I have in front of me here.
(Neil Shubin) What you have is a critter that is a real mix of characteristics. It was really amazing when we first found it.
Like a fish, it has scales on its back and fins with fin webbing. And there are all kinds of other parts to it that are very fishy.
But like an animal that lives on land—you know, a limbed animal—it has a flat head with eyes on top.
It has a neck. And when you look inside the fin, what do you see? You see bones that correspond to upper arm, forearm, even parts of a wrist.
It's really kind of amazing. It's a mix of creatures that live in water and creatures that live on land.
It shows us how creatures evolved to walk on land—a pivotal moment in the history of our world
and a pivotal moment in the history of our own bodies.
When we discovered this fossil in rocks that were 375 million years old in Nunavut Territory, on southern Ellesmere Island,
it seemed very natural for us to engage the local Inuit community in coming up with a name.
Tiktaalik is a name of a flat-headed fish—actually a living one—that they fish in the western part of the Arctic.
So they suggested that name to us when we asked them for a name, and it stuck.
(Tetsuto) Now I'm just switching to Dr. Tom Stewart, who is a post-doctoral scientist at the University of Chicago,
working with Neil Shubin. And he just published the important new findings about Tiktaalik.
(Tom Stewart) One of the classic problems in vertebrate evolution is the origin of the hand—how the fin evolved into a limb.
And so, having the opportunity to study that problem was really exciting to me.
When I joined the lab, we had just begun processing some CT scans of the original Tiktaalik materials,
which revealed for the first time a lot of details about how the fin was organized, and that sort of helped us to understand how fins evolved into limbs.
(Tetsuto) So did Tiktaalik have a hand?
(Tom Stewart) That's a great question. Usually people call things a hand if it has clear fingers and no fin web.
The fin web is a part of the skeleton that's composed of a certain type of skeleton called dermal fin rays,
and Tiktaalik had both dermal fin rays at the tip and no clear fingers, like that, at the end.
So if you were to ask me, I'd say "no it didn't" [have a hand], but people have their own opinions on how to define these things.
So Tiktaalik—the ancient "fish-a-pod" from Nunavut—is really changing the way that we look at the natural world:
how we imagine our ancestral land, how we think about our own evolutionary roots, and even ideas and careers of professional scientists.
So it's pretty powerful stuff. And we're very happy to have this creature with us in the collections right now.
But we're really looking forward to the day in the future when this amazing fossil makes its return to the ancient homeland in Nunavut.