Fish Fingers: Your Digits Used to Be Fins An artist's rendition
of the fish-tetrapod transition. CREDIT: Kalliopi Monoyios. An
ancient fish sported something like fingers that were the
precursors to our own digits, according to an analysis of a new
fossil skeleton. "It's really the last piece of evidence to say
fingers are not new. They were really present in fish," said
lead researcher Catherine Boisvert, an evolutionary biologist at
Uppsala University in Sweden. The fossilized skeleton belonged
to Panderichthys, a predatory fish that spanned up to 4 feet
(130 cm) and likely dwelled in shallow waters where it inched
along the muddy bottom about 385 million years ago. While the
fossil was discovered in the 1990s by chance in a brick quarry
in Latvia in northern Europe, scientists only recently analyzed
the fins with computed tomography (CT) and found that the right
paddle is tipped with four bony extensions. If you were to turn
back the clocks to the Devonian period when Panderichthys lived
and spied the fish