Here's a breathtaking finding: Scientists say they’ve discovered an ancient vestigial lung in the coelacanth, a lobe-finned fish that’s related to the ancient swimmer that went on to evolve into all tetrapods, humans included.
The find, described in the journal Nature Communications, helps to fill in some gaps in this mysterious lineage in the fishy family tree, and sheds light on how such fish might have looked around 410 million years ago.
Humans, like all mammals, reptiles, amphibians and birds, are tetrapods: four-legged vertebrate animals that all descended from an ancestral fish. This ancestor would have been a lobe-finned fish – somewhat different from the ray-finned fishes, from salmon to sardines, that fill the oceans today.