NANFA-- more on Shireen's distant relative
Christopher Scharpf (ichthos_at_charm.net)
Wed, 19 Jan 2000 14:56:00 -0400
HOW SHARK-LIKE ARE WE?
>Newly found fossils suggest that we're much more shark-like than
>we'd perhaps care to countenance. Reporting in the 13 January
>issue of Nature (403, 185 (2000)) Alison Basen of Macquarie
>University in Australia and colleagues describe the partial skull of
>a 400-million-year-old fossil fish discovered in southeastern
>Australia. It is one of the earliest known specimens of a
>ray-finned fish (or indeed of a bony fish of any kind). It offers a
>window on what our remotest ancestor among the bony fishes
>might have looked like. A report in Nature Science Update on 13
>January at http://helix.nature.com/nsu/000113/000113-8.html asks
>Could it be that sharks are more advanced, highly evolved
>vertebrates, and that bony fishes are primitive left-overs. This
>would turn conventional wisdom on its head and horrify most
>researchers.
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