Amphibious Ancestors

Vertebrates' transition to dry land took some fancy footwork

Imagine a scale-covered fish that uses fleshy limbs that end in fins to haul itself out of the water. Its mosaic of body features also includes sturdy ribs, the first vertebrate neck, and both gills and lungs. Paleontologists recently unearthed fossils of such a creature, which met their expectations for a proposed missing link between fish and the earliest land vertebrates.