Book Excerpt from Some Assembly Required

Decades spent cracking rocks have changed the way I see living things. If you know how to look, scientific research becomes a global treasure hunt for fossils of fish with arms, snakes with legs, and apes that can walk on two legs, all ancient creatures that tell about important moments in the history of life. In Your Inner Fish, I described how planning and luck led my colleagues and me to find Tiktaalik roseae in the High Arctic of Canada: a fish with a neck, elbows, and wrists. This creature bridged the gap between life in water and life on land, to reveal the important moment when our distant ancestors were fish. For almost two centuries, discoveries like these have told us how evolution happens, how bodies are built, and how they came into being. But paleontology has arrived at an important moment of change, one that coincided with the ...