Tiktaalik

I'm really excited to share my other favorite book, which maybe you never heard about it but I'm pretty sure when you start reading it you can't stop.The name of the book was different and kind of attractive " your inner fish", the more you read, it gets more and more clear. 

The first chapter’s introduction to the book was very amazing to me. When he describes his journey and how they ended up with Canadian Arctic to find evidence of how the fish species became land animals, I was really surprised at the effort put into looking for fossils to determine the growth of species. The discovery of tiktaalik, the transitional fossil, which is intermediate between fish and amphibians, was the most interesting part. So far in this book I learned about myself and about our histories and origin. The reflection of this chapter was that we and the animals around us are from one ancestors which soon evolved into another and another making branches and leaves wherever needed improvement just like in Darwin's natural selection. 

            Chapter two was kind of hard to understand, but it was a truly fascinating chapter. Having the same kind of limbs as other animals like birds, lizards, penguins, and seals it was interesting, But when the book started to talk about fishes, I was confused. Because it made sense that mammals and lizards can have similar limbs, but having similar limbs as fishes are just confusing also interesting. After reading chapter two, it helped me realize the importance of all the parts in the human body. Now that I understand how hard would be to do your everyday tasks without hands, I’m more appreciate. Also other parts in the body that are equally important to the hands or even more important, but as Shubin explains it "The answer must, at some level, be that the hand is a visible connection between us; it is a signature for who we are and what we can attain"(pg.29). I learned that some fishes have lungs. Once again tiktaalik amazed me when shubin and his team by removing his fins, discovered that it has a shoulder, elbow, and wrist similar to human arm. Another surprising fact about Tiktaalik was that they also find out it is capable of doing push-ups. It is really interesting to think of fishes as our ancestors.

 

Tiktaalik's fossil

            What was interesting in chapter three, was finding out that our body is made up of hundreds of different kinds of cells that give each of us our distinctive shapes. The most exciting experiment was on chicken and shark using ZPA and Sonic Hedgehog to create the mirror image of chicken’s wing and shark’s fin. It’s also interesting that a small, microscopic piece of ZPA have a huge influence on the shape of our hand. Also I learned that the skeletal structure of shark’s appendages is not similar to Owen’s theory "one bone-two bone-lotsa blobs-digits pattern." As you go further in the book you’ll find out how he makes the information interesting, and how he explained everything by showing pictures and helps us more to see what he was talking about. I really enjoyed this chapter; I hope that there are more to come about fossils. Every time I read a chapter of this book, I feel like I learn something new about myself.