Inside is a re-creation of a prehistoric human burial site. Shubin points to a cabinet across the room. On the way to us, something changed, and it was something more than just physical. Despite Lucy's proximity to humans, she's clearly not human. She's more apelike than modern humans, but getting there. Finally, we come to a familiar-looking 4-foot tall creature. Evolution brought fish, dinosaurs, mammals. The fossil called 'Lucy' was an Australopithecus and evolved from a common ancestor with humans.Īs Shubin and I walk through the exhibit, we see the results of tinkering with these genetic processes. Like in a human body, the first layer is our primate history, the second layer is our mammal history, and on and on and on and on, until you get to the fundamental molecular and cellular machinery that makes our bodies and keeps are cells alive, and so forth.'

'Layer after layer after layer is revealed to you. 'But the template, all the way down to the DNA that builds it, is already present in creatures like this.' 'We have a big brain, and portions of that big brain are not seen in Tiktaalik,' says Shubin. Of course, there are things that we have that Tiktaalik doesn't. 'Everything that we have are versions of things that are seen in fish,' says Shubin. Shoulders, elbows, legs, a neck, a wrist - they're all there in Tiktaalik. Shubin says his find, which he named Tiktaalik, represents an important evolutionary step, because it has the structures that will ultimately become parts of our human bodies. It took him years of searching in the Canadian Arctic, but in 2004, Neil Shubin found the fossilized remains of what he thinks is one of our most important ancestors. Zina Deretsky/National Science Foundation Known as a 'fishapod,' Tiktaalik bridged the gap between sea living and land living creatures, and played an important evolutionary role on our journey to becoming human. An illustration of what the sea creature Tiktaalik may have looked like.

The inner fish