Gaining ground the origin and evolution of tetrapods / Набирающий обороты вопрос о происхождении и эволюции четвероногих

Approximately 380 million years ago, something strange and significant happened on Earth. That time is part of an interval of Earth’s history called the Devonian period by scientists such as geologists and paleontologists, but in more popular imagination, it is known as the Age of Fishes. The reason for this is that after about 200 million years of earlier evolution, the vertebrates—animals with backbones—had produced an explosion of fishlike animals that lived in the nearshore lagoons, river estuaries, and lakes of the time. The strange thing that happened from the middle to the later parts of the Devonian period is that some of these fishlike animals evolved limbs with digits—fingers and toes. Over the ensuing 350 million years, these tetrapods gradually evolved from their aquatic ancestry into walking terrestrial vertebrates. These have dominated the land ever since this initial explosive radiation allowed them to colonize and exploit the land and its opportunities. The tetrapods, with their limbs and fingers and toes, include ourselves as humans, so that this distant Devonian event is profoundly significant for humans as well as for the planet <...>