Fetus' Feet Show Fish, Reptile Vestiges

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)."

Opinion isn't science. Ideas of tidiness are not science. Your comments and views actually sound like the arguments made in the pre-Darwinian period in that they emanated not from any experimental evidence but from pre-conceived concepts of what should be right (eg ideas of tidyness) based upon worldview.

Quite so. If I restricted myself to arguing science, I would merely point out the fact that the recurrent laryngeal nerve starts out relatively straight and gets stretched as the heart plunges deeper into the chest, and the fact that there is a homologous nerve and blood vessel in all the chordates, and conclude that the indirect path it takes is yet more evidence for the evolution of mammals from "primitive" chordates.

Similarly for the other examples. Evolution is highly constrained by what it has to work with; there is no reason to suppose that a "designer" is so constrained.

However, I was more arguing against ID. The basic claim is that living things reflect a conscious designer. OK. Assume that.

This is not a scientific claim, as nobody has ever come up with a useful algorithm for detecting design. (Maybe someday Dembski will, but I remain skeptical, to say the least). So it's basically an intuitive, aesthetic assertion.

We know of no other intelligent designers than ourselves. To assert that the design reflects intelligence, we have only our own standards to go by.

The examples I gave, and the ones I linked to, show that the hypothetical designer is either 1) often incompetent, 2) has such wildly different standards than we do as to make talk of its "intelligence" meaningless, or 3) doesn't exist.

Since these anomalies all fit neatly into standard biology, Occam tells us to go with 3)

I was more arguing against ID.

This is soething that is of interest to you?

We know of no other intelligent designers than ourselves.

Actually chipanzees select and prune sticks for specific tasks such as using them to insert in to ant hills to obtain a tasty treat.

You continue on to re-state your non-scientific opinions about incoptetence etc...OK, but they are worth exactly as much as soeone's opinion who believes opposite you.

As far as Occa's razor and the vagus nerve's tributaries, occam's razor would in fact be consistent with the current morphology you think is so bizarre and incompetent.

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