Life history of the 360-million-year-old tetrapod Acanthostega rewrites the tetrapod move on land
Wednesday, September 7, 2016 - 12:01
in Paleontology & Archaeology
This week in the journal Nature, a team of researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in France and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom shows that fossils of the 360 million-year-old tetrapod Acanthostega, one of the iconic transitional forms between fishes and land animals, are not adults but all juveniles. This conclusion, which is based on high-resolution synchrotron X-ray scans of fossil limb bones performed at the ESRF, sheds new light on the life cycle of Acanthostega and the so-called conquest of land by tetrapods.