Chance favored expedition leader in ‘missing link’ discovery

A graphic in an undergraduate geology textbook serendipitously led to the 2004 discovery of the missing link between fish and land animals far in the Canadian Arctic, one of the creature’s discoverers said during an April 16 lecture at Harvard. Neil Shubin, a professor at the University of Chicago and leader of the expedition that discovered Tiktaalik roseae, dedicated his career to finding an intermediary between lobe-finned fishes, which existed some 380 million years ago and early land animals, the first of which is thought to have existed 365 million years ago. read more

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