
Tiktaalik
375 million years ago
Anatomy Made for the Shallows
The rocks that preserve Tiktaalik were once a warm, swampy floodplain. Tiktaalik's flattened skull, eyes on top of its head, and sturdy fins suited it to propping itself up in shallow water and perhaps hauling over sandbars. Its limb bones line up almost perfectly with those of early tetrapods, showing that the toolkit for walking was assembled while these animals still lived mostly in water.
Read more
The rocks that preserve Tiktaalik were once a warm, swampy floodplain. Tiktaalik's flattened skull, eyes on top of its head, and sturdy fins suited it to propping itself up in shallow water and perhaps hauling over sandbars. Its limb bones line up almost perfectly with those of early tetrapods, showing that the toolkit for walking was assembled while these animals still lived mostly in water.






























































