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Tiktaalik — garment design
Tiktaalik, 3 of 10 in LifeIdea 1 of 3: Anatomy Made for the Shallows
Life 004—003

Tiktaalik

375 million years ago

From the archiveLife10 artifacts
From the record · 01 / 03

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.

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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.