A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A skillful writer, paleontologist Shubin conveys infectious enthusiasm and illustrates his points with dozens of drawings, sketches, tables and photographs.Įven readers with only a layperson’s knowledge of evolution will learn marvelous things about the unity of all organisms since the beginning of life.Ī Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.

Researchers have injected a mouse limb-development protein inside a fish egg to replace the fish equivalent, and the fish grows normal fins. The segments of DNA that produce proteins to guide the growth of a shark’s fin and a human arm are almost identical, and they go about their work in ways that haven’t changed in 500 million years. A fish and a human look identical for weeks after fertilization. It turns out nature works as economically in embryonic development as it does in evolution. He also explores how each creature’s DNA assembles a complete individual from a few identical cells. (It would be a devastating argument against evolution to find a creature with a different pattern of limb bones, but so far that has not happened.) The author traces the history of other body parts-teeth, head, ears, eyes-as far as they go, often billions of years. This ancient limb consisted of a single upper bone followed by two lower bones followed by a collection of primitive wrist bones-the same structure, Shubin emphasizes, found today in the limbs of all walking animals, including humans. of Chicago) made the front page of the New York Times in 2006 when he discovered a 375-million-year-old fossil fish whose fins contained rudimentary limb bones, perhaps the earliest ancestor of the first creatures that left the sea to live on land. Shubin (Organismal Biology and Anatomy/Univ. How human bones, organs and behavior reveal the history we share with fish, flies, worms and germs.

My inner fish book