Your inner fish
Why do we look the way we do? What does the human hand have in common with the wing of a fly? Are breasts, sweat glands, and scales connected in some way? To better understand the inner workings of our bodies and to trace the origins of many of today's most common diseases, we have to turn to unexpected sources: worms, flies, and even fish.Neil Shubin, a leading paleontologist and professor of anatomy who discovered Tiktaalik--the "missing link" that made headlines around the world in April 2006--tells the story of evolution by tracing the organs of the human body back millions of years, long before the first creatures walked the earth. By examining fossils and DNA, Shubin shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our head is organized like that of a long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genome look and function like those of worms and bacteria.Shubin makes us see ourselves and our world in a completely new light. Your Inner Fish is science writing at its finest--enlightening, accessible, and told with irresistible enthusiasm.From the Hardcover edition.
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- If I had to guess, they probably have some ideas. In Your inner fish (an excellent book, BTW) Neil Shubin has an afterword where he describes roughly how they went about deciding where to look for Tiktaalik. Basically, you start with whatever thing you want to find out more about; in the case of Tiktaalik, the transition of tetrapods from aquatic to terrestrial living. So you start by finding out where you have exposed sedimentary rocks of the correct age likely to be contain fossils. Next, you also need to the rocks to expose the right kind of environment: desert sands or deep ocean environments aren't going to help you find Tiktaalik, for that you need shallow waters and intertidal zones. Finally, it needs to be somewhere you can get to. So in this case, I wouldn't be surprised if they were purposefully looking for soft body preservation (especially since I think Cambrian fauna generally was quite soft and squishy).
From memory, to get fossilised soft tissues you want the remains to be buried extremely rapidly in an environment where the soft tissues don't decay (typically an anoxic environment, so for a shale basically covered in mud). So a mudslide is one option, and I think there are some lovely fossils North American from the end of the Cretaceous that are hypothesised to have been buried by the tidal wave caused by the Chicxulub impact.
Edit: After some googling, the Cretaceous fossils I was thinking of is Tanis,[0] which is in fact plausibly (but not universally) thought to be covered by the earthquake caused by the impact, before the tidal wave arrived.
- I strongly suggest reading Neil Shubin's "Your Inner Fish" which explains a bit more on how different bits etc evolved if you're interested in the topic.
- Neil Shubin's Your inner fish (a pretty cool book, I might add) discusses this briefly in the introduction. From memory, it's a question of combining geological knowledge with knowledge of what you want to find. Basically, you're looking for rocks that are likely to preserve fossils and of the correct environment (no use looking for deep sea sediments when looking for humanoids, for example) and the correct age for the fossils you're interested in. Now that you know more or less what kind of rocks are relevant, you can look at geological maps and find places where these rocks are exposed (and not, say, buried 2000 metres below the surface).
- For some history of teeth (not just human teeth) try the BBC In Our Time podcast episode The Evolution of Teeth:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003zbg
Being a Melvyn Bragg podcast, it includes a reading list:
Barry K. B. Berkovitz, Nothing But the Tooth: A Dental Odyssey (Elsevier, 2016)
John A. Long, The Rise of Fishes. 500 Million Years of Evolution (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)
Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (Vintage, 2009)
T. M. Smith, The Tales Teeth Tell: Development, Evolution, and Behaviour (MIT Press, 2018)
Peter S. Ungar, Teeth: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2014)
Peter S. Ungar, Evolution’s Bite: A Story of Teeth, Diet and Human Origins (Princeton University Press, 2018)
- There's a great detailed explanation of this and many other evolutionary processes such as the eyes, in the book "Your Inner Fish"
https://www.amazon.com/Your-Inner-Fish-Journey-3-5-Billion-Y...
- I'm guessing you mean excluding textbooks
The Extended Phenotype Your Inner Fish Thinking Fast and Slow The Information Chaos Statistics in Plain English Fortune's Formula Fooled by Randomness A Random Walk Down Wall St. How to Win Friends and Influence People
