I love outdated museum displays. They marvelously represent the “history” part of natural history exhibits – dusty dioramas of old ideas that are a baseline for how much our understanding has changed.

One of my favorite displays is tucked away in a dim corner of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. If you just amble through the main gallery – beneath the osteological frames of the ever-popular dinosaurs – you’re bound to miss it. The humble little scene, displayed in a glass case along a wall running behind the Mesozoic celebrities, envisions one of the most important moments in evolutionary history. On a dried, cracked mudflat, an intrepid Devonian fish makes a foray out onto land. The scene represents the