ABC (the Australian one) reveals a whale of a prehistoric puzzle piece – or at least a missing link that paleontologists have finally reeled in:
A team of scientists, including an Australian, have found a fossil of a 419-million-year-old ancient armoured fish, in what is being hailed as the most significant paleontological discovery in decades.
Palaeontologists say the fossilised fish, which was found in the suburbs of a city in south-west China, is probably the earliest creature with a recognisable jaw.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, fish known as Placoderms had armoured plates and dominated the oceans.
[Said Professor John Long, of Flinders University,] “This ancient fish called Entelognathus is the missing link because it shows that the extinct armoured Placoderms fishes, which dominated the seas, rivers and lakes of the world for 70 million years, actually were the ancestors to all the living fish on the planet today.”
…
“This fish fills a gap between an extinct class of animals and the entire living fish fauna on the planet, which is 30,000 species.
“It’s a huge discovery that fills a massive gap in our knowledge of the evolution of the first backboned animals.”