Posted on 05/20/2006 6:02:56 PM PDT by Al Simmons
Fetus' Feet Show Fish, Reptile Vestiges By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News
May 18, 2006 — The feet of human embryos taking shape in the womb reveal links to prehistoric fish and reptiles, a new study finds.
Human feet may not look reptilian once babies emerge from the womb, but during development the appendages appear similar to prehistoric fish and reptiles. The finding supports the theory that mammalian feet evolved from ancient mammal-like reptiles that, in turn, evolved from fish.
It also suggests that evolution -- whether that of a species over time or the developmental course of a single organism -- follows distinct patterns.
In this case, the evolution of mammalian feet from fish fins to four-legged reptiles to four-limbed mammals to human feet appears to roughly mirror what happens to a maturing human embryo.
"Undoubtedly there are clear parallels between the mammal-like reptilian foot and the human foot," said Albert Isidro, an anthropologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain and lead author of the study, which appeared in the journal The Foot.
Isidro and colleague Teresa Vazquez made the determination after analyzing fossils of a number of mammal-like reptiles that lived from 75 to 360 million years ago. The scientists also studied fossils of osteolepiform fish, which appear to be half fish and half reptilian. These fish lived 400 million years ago and had lungs, nostrils and four fins located where limbs would later be found in four-footed reptiles and mammals.
In 33-day-old human embryos, the scientists observed "the outline of a lower extremity in the form of a fin, similar to that seen in osteolepiform fishes." As the embryo continued to develop, the researchers focused their attention on two foot bones: the calcaneous, or heel bone, and the talus, which sits between the heel and the lower leg.
At 54 days of gestation, these two bones sit next to each other as they did within the reptile herbivore Bauria cynops, which lived around 260 million years ago. This ancient reptile had flat, crushing teeth and mammalian features.
At eight and a half weeks of gestation, the researchers found the two embryonic foot bones resemble those seen in the Diademodon vegetarian dinosaur, which lived around 230 million years ago.
"We can tell that the embryo is half way between the reptiles and the mammals (at this stage)," Isidro told Discovery News.
The two foot bones continue to develop until, at nine weeks, they resemble that of placental mammals as they emerged 80 million years ago.
This development of feet in the human embryo mirrors how the foot evolved over millions of years beginning with fish and ending with early mammals, according to the scientists.
Supporting the fish/foot link was the discovery last month of a new species, Tiktaalik roseae, which lived 375 million years ago. It had fish fins and scales, but also limb parts found in four-legged animals.
"Tiktaalik blurs the boundary between fish and land-living animals both in terms of its anatomy and its way of life," said Neil Shubin, professor and chairman of organismal biology at the University of Chicago and co-author of a related paper in the journal Nature.
H. Richard Lane, director of sedimentary geology and paleobiology at the National Science Foundation, said, "These exciting discoveries are providing fossil ‘Rosetta Stones’ for a deeper understanding of this evolutionary milestone: fish to land-roaming tetrapods (four limbed animals)."
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Developmental Biology 101.
Utter nonsense.
you can call them reptiles, just don't dare call a fetus a baby.
Holy crap, this thread has all the elements, doesn't it?
Study finds??? I've known this since I was a kid, and I'm older than I want to admit. We really are getting dumbed down, aren't we?
And I DO tend to shed in the Spring.
prisoner6
The part of the article that is idiotic, and I guess the basis of the "new study," is the attempt to compare fetal development to specific prehistoric fossils. There is no need and no ability to make such a specific comparison.
Exactly, I remember leaning something similar to this back in high school biology in the early 90's. We compared images of developing embryos during different developmental stages and how similar a human embryo was in appearance to a pig or fish embryo at different times.
This nonsense was exposed for the lie it is a long time ago. Recycled dog feces.
In any case, if the bio-system was simply assembled in a factory (somewhere) using appropriate technology, you might well find the exact same process exhibited as a mammal's feet were grown.
It's the height of hubris to look at something like this and conclude that there are magical/mystical/butotherwise unmeasurable forces at work, lurking in the background, deciding that feet should/must develop in this manner.
The simplest solution is the design engineers at the "mammal feet" factory came up with this one because it was more economical, easier, superior to other methods, or they didn't wrap up the job as well as they thought they did.
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Ping.
LOL! I was taught this crap in junior high--"it looks like a gill, therefore we were fish."
There were famous illustrations in all the school biology textbooks for many years, showing this kind of fetal development. Most of us probably used one of those textbooks when we were children. They have long been proven to be complete lies.
I would imagine this is yet another example of wishful thinking by some hapless Darwinist.
Red Meat...you are evil.
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