Image courtesy of Der Naturen
Bloeme/Nationale Bibliotheek, fair use doctrine.
Joel Kontinen
An extra fin bone has been shown
to be the Darwinian mechanism that brought fish on shore.
M. Brent Hawkins, a postdoc at
Harvard Medical School, found clues while studying the development of zebrafish.
He found out that two mutated genes, vav2 and waslb, on two different chromosomes
that independently added bones to the fins. And
they didn’t just create the bones themselves: The mutations also made the blood
vessels, joints, and muscles needed to make the bones work, he and his
colleagues report today in Cell.
The fish’s development “follows a very similar process to the formation one of
the long bones in our arm.
This isn’t the first time
evolutionists speak of fish getting legs.
But it is
just a bit of evolutionary just so-story.
Pennisi, Elizabeth. 2021. Mutant zebrafish with
extra fin bones may hold clues to how the first animals walked on land Science 4 February.
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