Paleontologists have long argued about what kind of creature was the ancestor of fish. A variety of assumptions are being put forward. Someone believes that fish evolved from annelids, someone from spiders. Such an option is not excluded: fish are descendants of those land animals that are bored with land. They settled in the water, got used to it, became covered with scales and still swim …
REVIVING FISH
Paleontologists find the remains of cross-finned fish in soil layers, whose age reaches 300 million years. The fossil finds are covered with scales, but their mouths resemble animal muzzles, and their fins resemble animal paws. This similarity allowed scientists to assume that cross-finned fish are the progenitors of all four-legged animals on Earth.
It was believed that the fossil was long extinct, but in December 1938, South African ichthyologists caught a live cross-finned fish, which in honor of its first explorer Miss Courtenay-Latimer was named latimetria.
The fish was 1.5 meters long, while its fossil ancestors reached 20-25 centimeters. The lungs of latimetria atrophied and turned into a large bag filled with mucus and fat. Instead of fish eggs, two dozen orange-sized eggs were found in the female's oviduct.
Further observations showed that coelacanths are ovoviviparous, ready-made 30-centimeter fish emerge from their eggs. For the rest, modern cross-finned are very similar to their fossil relatives.
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FACE PROGRESS
Relatives of cross-finned, and therefore the ancestors of land animals are considered lungfish. Three groups of lungs living in fresh water in the tropics of Africa, Australia and South America have survived to this day.
Over time, lungfish and cross-finned fish acquired a cocky character and learned to hide in algae: crawling along the bottom, they watched for prey, and then headlong pounced on it. Hunting in this way, they gradually acquired both limbs and a powerful toothy jaw.
Having replenished their hunting arsenal, lungs and cross-finned ones began to open their mouths for larger prey, for which they needed more intensive oxidation to digest, and, consequently, an influx of oxygen. The fish began to swallow air from the surface with their mouths, and their swim bladder over time transformed into a lung.
With the advent of limbs and lungs, fish began to go on land in search of mollusks and arthropods. Before the primitive amphibians, the cross-finned and double-breathing were only one step away. But this step was not taken by them, but by the four-legged reptiles, mammals and even humans following them.
THE GIFT OF PRESENTATION?
It does not seem strange to biologists that we inherited the five-fingered mechanism of feet and hands from cross-finned fish. Indeed, within their fleshy fins are bones similar to human bones in the arms and legs.
A-frog; B-salamander; B-crocodile; G-bat; D-man: 1-humerus, 2-radius, 3-bones of the wrist, 4-metacarpus, 5-phalanges of the fingers, 6-ulna
The shoulder girdle of "living fossils" consists of the scapula, clavicle, humerus, ulna and radius, and bony outgrowths remain in place of the fingers, which suggests that these are rudiments of palms and fingers.
But where did the cross-finned - typical marine inhabitants - get the limb bones of typical land animals and humans? After all, they do not fully use the limb motor apparatus. Perhaps the cross-finned fish had the gift of foresight?
Or did they know that after they went on land, they would need both arms and legs?
Hard to believe. After all, following the logic, any organ of the body must be functionally involved from the moment it appears. Otherwise, it will be not only superfluous, but also harmful to the body.
The following scenario looks more plausible: the original man receives from God both the lower and upper limbs. The same body organization passes from man to monkeys, from monkeys to four-legged mammals, from them to reptiles, amphibians and cross-finned fishes.
At the same time, the functional significance of the limbs decreases over and over again, from transition to transition they undergo irreversible changes until they finally turn into fins.
MAGIC TRANSFORMATION
Animals that have chosen water as their habitat are gradually beginning to adapt to it. First, they lose their neck: the shoulders interfere with the movement of the body in the water, so the head grows together with the body. Paired limbs turn into flippers and fins.
The tail is flattened in a vertical plane, forming a kind of rudder for moving up and down - the upper and lower blades. The pelvic girdle of the former land, and often the hind limbs themselves, atrophy due to lack of demand.
Gradually, for the convenience of movement in water, the body is flattened in a vertical plane: the skull is pulled up and squeezed from the sides, the ribs are straightened.
THE AMBASSADORS OF A NEW LIFE
We have every reason to believe that fish were land dwellers in the past. The progenitors of most bony fish had lungs, one must think that they inherited oxygen breathing from land animals. Some Soviet scientists have suggested that the ancestors of man could have been the nayapitecs - seaside monkeys that lived several million years ago on the sandy shores of sea lagoons.
However, from our point of view, nayapitecs could be a special branch of degraded people who switched to a semi-aquatic lifestyle. If the evolution of coastal monkeys had lasted for some more time, then, probably, they could acquire gills along with lungs, as well as a tail and swimming membranes between the toes and hands.
At one time, Belyaev's novel "Amphibian Man" was extremely popular, in which a professor transplants the gills of a young shark to a man. There could be no question of such a transplant in real life, it is clear that the novel was considered fantastic, but meanwhile Belyaev was not so far from the truth …
It is known that a person is born practically underdeveloped - he has a peculiar form of neoteny (preservation of the characteristic features of larvae in an adult animal). Only by the age of 3 years does the newborn enter its physical norm. By the age of 11, his milk teeth fall out and permanent ones grow. Puberty occurs at the age of 14.
According to some scientists, these facts indicate that man is an underdeveloped form of a higher being - superman, and the monkey is an underdeveloped man. Thus, a completely different picture of evolution looms before us. The resettlement of living beings goes from land to sea, and not vice versa. Due to underdevelopment and early puberty, animals bypass adult forms.
Thus obtained a new species of animals in the process of struggle for existence is forced to change the habitat and adapt to it. It is clear that with such a turn of events, establishing the relationship between many species of animals is problematic. After all, scientists did not even assume that, for example, the amphibian ambistoma is an adult form of the aquatic inhabitant of the axolotl. They were considered to be independent species of animals.
Axolotl and (below) ambistoma
Methods of comparative morphology, embryology, and even paleontology are unlikely to help establish the relationship between different animal species. How can you know that animals, different in structure and way of life, are in fact just stages of development of one and the same creature? In addition, many adult forms can disappear without leaving a fossil record.
Rethinking Baer's law of embryonic similarity and Haeckel's biogenetic law, we can say that in the human embryo, or rather, in the “ideal” embryo of a hypothetical “superman”, like nesting dolls in a matryoshka, there are already “ready” embryos of all land and aquatic animals, up to the simplest unicellular.
Haeckel was wrong in asserting that the embryos of the higher animals repeat the lower forms. In fact, in the higher embryos, the lower animals are already "laid". The embryo of the higher beings contains the embryos of the lower ones, it is already prepared in order to, if necessary, erupt from itself all the diversity of the animal and plant world, the messengers of new life.
Sergey BORODIN
