Human Ancestor Had Shark Head
Thursday, June 14th, 2012
Go ahead and take a gander back through the lineage of human history and you’re going to find some real nightmare fuel. One such grotesquerie? How about a human ancestor with a shark head.
This now-extinct fish was among the first to split from sharks, whose bones are made of cartilage, to evolve into a line of tough-boned species that includes everything from bony fish to human beings. A new analysis finds that this controversial class of animals was more shark-like than expected.
“The common ancestors of all jawed vertebrates today organized their heads in a way that resembled sharks,” study researcher John Finarelli, a vertebrate biologist at University College, Dublin, said in a statement. “Given what we now know about the interrelatedness of early fishes, these results tell us that while sharks retained these features, bony fishes moved away from such conditions.”
This little darling lived roughly 290 million years ago, some 150 million years after sharks and bony fish families split.
[Fox News]
