Discovering fossil fishes / Поиски ископаемых рыб

F.ishes have a unique evolutionary" history that stretches back in time more than 450 million yrears. They are incredibly ancient, older than the dinosaurs, and include the ancestors of all the limbed vertebrates living on land, even humans. Human evolution is rooted in fishes; and scientists have discovered traces of 360-million-ycar-old fossils of transitional aquatic creatures that had both gills and limbs.Not only are humans and fishes related, some fishes are more closely related to humans than they" are to other fishes! We commonly think of ourselves as completely separate from our aquatic ancestors when instead we should be marveling at the similarities.
Let's see where we fit in. Humans are classified as tetrapods (four-footed; more generally, having two pairs of limbs). This same designation applies to all the air-breathing land vertebrates with which we are familiar: all other mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. The tetrapods in turn are a highly specialized offshoot of a very" ancient class of animals, the Sarcopterygii. The only other living members of this group are the coelacanths and the lungfishes. It seems that we have very important, and very fishy, ancestors! <...>