Fish’s Dna May Explain How Fins Turned to Feet

Throughout the history of Evolutionary Anthropology, humans, animals and dinosaurs have been following separate courses of evolution for the past 8 million years. Dinosaurs themselves may no longer exist, but many of their relatives are still roaming earth presently. Among these relatives are birds, reptiles, and even fish. Fish from the order Coelacanthiformes were thought to have become extinct 70 million years ago, at the same time that the dinosaurs were wiped out until one was caught in the mid 1930s. Since then, only a handful of coelacanths have been found, and scientists have been using these fish and examining their fleshy fins to study the transition from fins to feet.
In the New York Times article, Fish’s DNA May Explain How Fins Turned to Feet, author Nicholas Wade goes into detail on this amazing pivotal step in evolution. This article reveals the evolutionary advancement emerging in the scientific community. Researchers were able to decode the 2.8 million units of DNA, or genome, of the coelacanth. Since it’s genome is about the same size as human beings, it makes it a lot simpler to decode the DNA and therefore revealing some answers on what evolutionary alterations were needed to change a finned fish into a land tetrapod.
This is important because it is a giant stepping stone in evolution as it will answer the central question of most evolutionists. With this they will discover how fish learned to walk and breathe air 400 billion years ago. In this specific article, it can be seen that new evolutionary ideas are being proven and that coelacanths can possibly be the first ancestral fish that used fins to walk on land. These discoveries show that with a modification from one single ancestor, a directional change can and will happen. In it’s broadest sense, evolution.