My name is Neil Shubin.
I'm from the University of Chicago where I'm a professor
in the faculty of the anatomy department there.
I also hold an appointment at the Field Museum of Natural
History, also in Chicago.
So you have to understand the setting.
The setting of the day we found it was, this was our
last expedition to the Canadian Arctic.
We were running out of money, and I'm not
saying this for drama.
It's really expensive to work there.
We had worked there for a number of years already with
very little success.
We had not much to show for ourselves.
We decided to sort of spend the lot and have one last
season working at that layer.
So Steve's cracking rocks.
Steve is up about seven feet from me and he says, hey Neil,
what's this?
And I remember looking at the thing and saying, OK, we have
a flat-headed fish.
I looked at Ted and Farish who were the co-leaders of the
expedition.
We were like, oh, my god.
I mean, there were two feelings, one was just
incredible joy, but the other was incredible relief.
This was our last chance at this.
And as soon as I saw what this object was, I knew we had
found what we had spent six years and I'd spent 20 years
before looking for.
Well, since I was a graduate student, I was interested in
one of the great evolutionary events in earth history, which
is the transition from life in water to life on land.
And you think about that.
It's a remarkable transition, because so much in the animals
have to change.
So I got interested early on in this transition and my goal
was to find new evidence to tell us about how it happened.
So what I did starting in the early '90s was to try to find
rocks in the world that had the right properties to hold
the fossils that would tell us about this transition, from a
fish that has like a conical head and fins to a land-living
animal of the time, in the Devonian, which has a flat
head with limbs.
So we looked around the world and it eventually became clear
through a moment of serendipity that one of the
best places and most unexplored places to look for
such a fossil was in the Canadian Arctic.
We discovered it from a geological textbook, not the
scientific literature.
It was completely accidental.
But it turns out these were the perfect rocks of the right
age and exposed to the surface to produce such an
intermediate.
And what it looks like is you have a flat head with eyes on
top, and then you essentially have the body of what looks
like a fish, a stubby fish, because it has scales and
stubby fins.
Now, what's great about Tiktaalik it's a great melange
of characteristics of fish and land-living creature.
The shape of the head, the proportions of the head, the
bones, and so forth are very much like a land-living animal
and then other parts are fish-like.
What's remarkable about the fin is when you take out the
fin webbing, it has bones that correspond to the upper arm, a
humerus, forearm, a radius ulna, and even portions of the
risk, the so-called proximal carpel, so a real remarkable
transitional creature.
It had both lungs and gills.
And what's exceptional about this is just how ordinary it
is in the sense that it's exactly the intermediate that
you would likely predict.
So what this does, is it tells us a lot about the shift from
water to land along with the other creatures that's up
there, hundreds of other fossils that colleagues around
the world have found.
It tells us a lot about how this
great transition happened.
When Tiktaalik was announced in the pages of Nature, we had
two articles which was nice because it gives us a chance
to do a lot of basic description of the creature.
Well, it hit a lot of news headlines in April of 2006
when it came out.
So much so I was dropping my son of at school the day it
was announced, and his teacher said, hey, bring in the fish.
So I brought the cast of fossil, which we
made at that point.
I remember showing if the kids, and I said, hey, guys,
what do you think it is?
One kid said, oh, it looks like a crocodile.
And you can see why he said it's like a crocodile because
it has flat eyes on top and you can even see
teeth on the side.
Another kid corrected him and said, no, no, it's a fish.
It's got scales, and it has fins.
And I said, hey, you're both right, because they got the
concept right immediately.
And so you know, if only adults in Louisiana would get
what kids got really quickly in preschool.
What inspires me is this transition from life in water
to life on land is not just some esoteric twig on the
evolutionary tree.
It's very important for us.
It's very important because this event is part of our own
evolutionary history when our common ancestor was a fish.
So that this proto wrist we see for the first time in
Tiktaalik and its evolution cousins, it's something that
became our own wrists.
This neck that we see for the first time in Tiktaalik and
its evolutionary cousins is something that was to become
our own necks.
Inside our organs, inside our genes, inside our cells carry
artefacts of the history of life, carry events like this
of which is one of countless events in the last three
billion years.
The basis for the name, we had a naming project with the
Inuit elders.
And we have all the pieces together.
It takes the right geological conditions.
It takes the right geological conditions to find it, and
then it takes almost the right geological conditions--