Today, the average fish only has fins, but paleontologists have discovered that in the remote past, about 380 million years ago, at least some fish had fingers.
The digits on these ancient fish were rudimentary, but apparently functional, as they include finger bones, similar to vertebrates that came later.
“We have made a major breakthrough in the origin of how the hand was first formed for all vertebrates,” paleontologist John Long of Flinders University in Australia told Michelle Starr for ScienceAlert.
“This is the first time that we have unequivocally discovered fingers locked in a fin with fin-rays in any known fish. The articulating digits in the fin are like the finger bones found in the hands of most animals,” he said in a statement.
Source: https://www.sciencealert.com/this-ancient-fish-represents-the-earliest-known-evolutionary-evidence-of-fingers
Wow. I had no idea. I’m still hoping they’ll find evidence of the ole saying, “Eyes are the window to the soul.”
I guess that has nothing to do with this, though. 🤔
New finds happen all the time. There’s probably evidence for that in the fossil record, but it just hasn’t been unearthed yet. 🙂