Tiktaalik: music to my ears.

Tiktaalik is the lilting name of a newly discovered fossil fish with fingers. It lived 380 million years ago in the northern reaches of Canada, back when the northern reaches of Canada were tropical coastal wetlands not far from the equator. Tiktaalik’s discoverers (Ted Daeschler, Neil Shubin, and Farish Jenkins) detailed their discovery in back-to-back papers in today’s issue of Nature. In some ways Tiktaalik is big news. It may prove to be the single most important fossil for telling us how our ancestors changed from fish to land vertebrates complete with legs, arms, fingers, and toes. But in other ways, Tiktaalik is no news at all–and its non-newsworthiness makes it just as important.

The