The New York Times, September 17, 2025
About 360 million years ago, our fishy ancestors moved from water to land. Along the way, their fins turned into feet, with toes. And hundreds of millions of years later, the front pair evolved into hands.
To understand this profound evolutionary transformation, scientists have spent decades studying the fossils of extinct fish that sported limb-like fins. They have also compared the embryos of modern-day fish and land vertebrates to understand how their fins and limbs develop.
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