Paleontologist and author Neil Shubin discussed how animals are connected Monday night in Mem-Aud.
Author and paleontologist Neil Shubin discussed his discoveries and how humans are related to fish as a part of Ohio University’s Kennedy Lecture Series on Monday night.
Speaking to a nearly full Templeton-Blackburn Alumni Memorial Auditorium, Shubin explained how all animals are connected.
“I like to think as we develop cures for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, the breakthroughs that enrich and change our lives will come from worms, flies and mice,” Shubin, the author of The Universe Within (2013) and Your Inner Fish (2008), said. “I can’t imagine a more powerful or beautiful statement on the connection of all lives.”
Shubin also discussed how, in 2004, he and his team helped discover the fossil of an animal with the head of a crocodile and gills of a fish that lived 375 million years ago.
“We almost called it quits in 2004, and then (a team member) uncovered a rock,” he said. “We found what we had spent six years looking for.”
The team sent the fossil back to a lab in Chicago in the bottom of a helicopter.
The animal had fins and scales like a fish and a neck and ribs like a limbed animal.
“We wanted a flat-headed fish with fins,” Shubin said. “Like a fish, it has scales, but it has the proportions of a limbed animal.”
The fossil they found eventually was named Tiktaalik roseae, meaning large freshwater fish, by the local people.
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“We had a naming project inviting people to choose a name that met two criteria — that is was meaningful and could be pronounced,” Shubin said.
Willem Roosenburg, associate professor of biological sciences, said he worked with Shubin as his teaching assistant in the early '90s and said Shubin has since made important evolutionary discoveries.
“Neil has discovered many fossil intermediaries and unveiled gaps,” Roosenburg said.
Shubin said animals such as Tiktaalik help connect fossils throughout time.
“We can follow the trails of the fossils,” he said. “We can use multiple lines of evidence to connect to human anatomy.”
Megan Osika, a senior studying environmental and plant biology, said she enjoyed Shubin’s lecture.
“I thought it was interesting how he got the idea for the project because of how he used the geological map,” she said, adding how he used an old geological textbook to find the location where he researched with his team.
Shubin is a Robert Bensley Distinguished Service Professor and associate dean of Biological Sciences at the University of Chicago.
He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2011.
New York University's professor Marion Nestle will speak about food politics at the next presentation of the Kennedy Lecture Series on March 21.
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