![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() “I worked that site for ten years,” Shubin told TIME, “so making the documentary was like a homecoming. It took years of painstaking searching, requiring return visits during the brief Arctic summer year after year for a full decade until, in the second week of July, 2004, they found what they were looking for. Something must have happened in that 40-million year gap to make the transition to land possible, and armed with the knowledge of the timeframe and the places in the world where sedimentary rock of the right age was accessible, Shubin and his team ended up on Ellesmere Island, in spectacularly remote and austere landscape not far from the northern tip of Greenland. ![]() They swam the world’s oceans 400 million years ago-and then, 40 million years later, the first amphibians were up on land. Fish, he reminds us, were the first animals with backbones, skulls and overall bony skeletons. The search for Tiktaalik was a scientific detective story, and that’s just how he lays it out. Part of the reason Your Inner Fish deserves your now fully human attention is that Shubin is such an engaging guide to what could otherwise be a dry and dusty topic, but which, thanks to his genial enthusiasm and clarity, is anything but. ![]()
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