Date Time
We’re more like primitive fishes than once believed
People traditionally think that lungs and limbs are key innovations that came with the vertebrate transition from water to land. But in fact, the genetic basis of air-breathing and limb movement was already established in our fish ancestor 50 million years earlier. This, according to a recent genome mapping of primitive fish conducted by the University of Copenhagen, among others. The new study changes our understanding of a key milestone in our own evolutionary history.
There is nothing new about humans and all other vertebrates having evolved from fish. The conventional understanding has been that certain fish shimmied landwards roughly 370 million years ago as primitive, lizard-like animals known as tetrapods. According to this understanding, our fish ancestors came out from water to land by converting their fins to limbs and breathing under water to air-breathing.
By News Editor And Partners
• Dec 22, 2020
New Mexico State University biology Professor Peter Houde is among more than 200 researchers involved in phase two of a massive effort at mapping the genomes of each of the world’s 10,500 bird species. In the project known as B10K, researchers from University of Copenhagen and partner institutions have sequenced 363 genomes from 92.4 percent of all bird families on Earth.
Completion of the first phase of the study in 2014 resulted in the release of dozens of publications in special issues of several premier scientific journals. Initial phase two results were published in the Nov. 12 issue of the journal “Nature.” Each of the four phases work incrementally higher up the family tree of birds to the species level, analyzing how their genomes have evolved from dinosaurs over the last 150 million years.