Scientists discover why we all have fish fingers

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
Updated:

You may think you have little or no connection to the ugly-looking customer pictured below.

After all, you're an intelligent and good-looking Daily Mail reader and it is a crocodile-like beast that splashed about in the seas 385million years ago.

But it was the choice of creatures such as this to crawl out of the water and on to the land that mean you can hold this newspaper today.

For in doing so, their fins slowly evolved into what eventually became our fingers (and our toes, too).

Enlarge   Fish fingers

The fins of the Panderichthys, pictured above, evolved into what eventually became our fingers

The idea that the digits of land vertebrates were derived from the bones contained within fish fins is not new.

But it fell out of favour in the 1990s largely based on earlier studies of Panderichthys - our toothy friend pictured above - which appeared to show that it lacked the necessary finger-like divisions in its fins.

Instead, it was thought that digits in vertebrates developed simply as an 'evolutionary novelty'.

But now the findings of a study of a fossil have shown that the original interpretation was correct - Panderichthys did indeed have the divisions in its fins that would one day become fingers and toes.

The discovery has been made by biotechnologist Dr Catherine Boisvert and her colleagues at Uppsala University in Sweden after they X-rayed the fossil using computer scans.

She said their findings made a strong case for our digits not being just the happy accident of evolution.

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