Who are you calling primitive?

Yes, I admit it. I'm only writing this post for the gratuitous coelacanth shot below. And the fact I need to write something because its very slow in the world of pharmaceutical news this week and I'm not used to being bored at work.

That aside some really quite interesting new research is out that challenges the notion of evolution as some sort of escalator of superiority.

Coelacanths are thought of as the original "living fossil", since the first living (well only recently dead) example was fished out of the Indian Ocean in East London in 1938. (That's East London, South Africa.) Previously, this group of lobe-finned fishes had only been known from the fossil record.

But new research suggests we shouldn't dismiss coelacanths as being primitive.

For some time now, scientists have hoped that examining the lobed fins of coelacanths and lung fishes would hint at how fishes' fins evolved into the limbs of the first land-dwelling vertebrates.

But now researchers from the University of Chicago say that the fins of living coelacanths are just too specialised, after discovering a new coelacanth fossil.

"Our fossil shows that what we've using to define a primitive state is actually very specialised," says lead author Matt Friedman. "It might give a deceptive view of what evolution was like for these fin skeletons.

"If you're going to figure out how limbs evolved you need to have a good idea about pre-conditions," he adds.

This is where the new fossil has helped. It shows that the ancestral pattern of lobed fins closely resembles the pattern in the fins of primitive living ray-finned fishes.

It challenges the idea of coelacanth as a "living fossil" because the fishes have continued changing since coelacanths were fossilised, by continued evolution or random genetic drift, which surely must have happened in the 4 million years since coelacanths disappeared from the fossil record. Perhaps the lovely term of a lazarus species is more suitable.

It also reinforces the notion that every living thing adapts to its own niche, as Darwin tells us.

So a duck-billed platypus is only inferior to humans in our minds. A duck-billed platypus is perfectly happy is its own niche and has no desire for consciousness or opposable thumbs. (And that's the point, the idea of a platypus being happy or otherwise in this sense is a concept only we can think of.)

The identification of the first coelacanth's is a great tale of scientific discovery (see here) and is re-told in A Fish Caught in Time.