CCN (Crazy Cal News) - Chicago - Evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago and The Field Museum in Chicago found a fish fossil in his Chinese Fish Soup while visiting a Chinese restraunt this weekend. "The amazing thing about the fossil," said Shubin, "is that it doesn't taste like fish soup at all."
Another finding that Shubin made was that the fins of the modern paddlefish, Polyodon spathula, share a distinctive pattern of gene activity with the limbs of all four-limbed animals, according to a new report. "These fins evolved perhaps 200 million years ago," said Shubin.
JR Minkel at ScientificAmerican.com wrote,
Shubin and his University of Chicago co-workers studied a fleshy nub at the base of each of Polyodon's rear fins, each of which contains a fanlike array of bones [see image above] that corresponds to the leg bones of four-limbed animals, called tetrapods. The team analyzed these areas for the activity of a telltale group of genes called Hox, which are active during the embryonic development of all known animals.
"This still doesn't explain why the fossil didn't taste like the rest of the fish soup," said Shubin. "I guess it's all those thousands of years of deposited minerals."
