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Fishy ear story reported in ScienceNOW, news@nature 18 Jan 2006
and Nature vol 439, p318, 19 January 2006. One of the problems
involved in evolving from a fish to a land dwelling animal is
building the middle ear, an air filled cavity containing a bone
that conveys sound from the eardrum to the inner ear.
Palaeontolgists at Uppsala University, Sweden have studied the
skull of a fossil fish named Panderichthys believed to have
evolved 370 million years ago, about the same time the first
land dwelling animals were evolving and compared it with another
fish and an "early tetrapod" (four legged land dwelling animal).
Like sharks and rays Panderichthys had a hollow tube called a
spiracle through the roof of the mouth supported by a bony strut
called the hyomandibula. The Uppsala researchers found that the
fossil fish had "a wide, straight spiracle rather than a narrow
one, and a shortened hyomandibula." They concluded that the
spiracle was evolving