Ever wonder when a fish is not a fish? The answer is this Thursday at the Royal Tyrrell Museum Speaker Series.
The April 23 edition of the 2015 Royal Tyrrell Museum Speaker Series is a presentation by the Museum’s own Dr. Donald Henderson, Curator of Dinosaurs, entitled “A Big Step for a Fish – The Evolution of Four-Legged Land Animals.”
The last part of the Devonian Period and the early part of Carboniferous Period – 380 to 330 million years ago – were important times in the evolution of backboned animals.
The Devonian has sometimes been called “The Age of Fishes” as there were more types of fishes alive than at any other time in Earth’s history. The last part of the Devonian is when some fishes with “legs” started to move from shallow water onto land. These fishes were the distant ancestors of what would become amphibians, reptiles, and mammals in the hundreds of millions of years that would follow.
For over 150 years, we had very little understanding of this transition with only a handful of localities worldwide producing most of the fossils, and leaving several significant “gaps” in the fossil record.
However, over the past twenty-five years things have changed dramatically with new localities and exceptional fossils being discovered.
This talk will review the fossil record and our understanding of the early colonization of the land by back-boned animals.
The Royal Tyrrell Museum’s Speaker Series talks are free and open to the public. The series is held every Thursday until April 30, 2015 at 11:00 a.m. in the Museum auditorium.
