Scientists raised these fish to walk on land

"I used to look at fins and their motion, and I always thought it was so interesting and complex," says Emily Standen, lead author of a study published in Nature today, and an evolutionary biomechanics researcher who now works at the University of Ottawa. To find out exactly what might have happened when aquatic animals first moved to land, Standen and her colleagues took 111 juvenile Polypterus senegalus — a fish species that goes by the common name Senegal bichir, or "dinosaur eel" — and raised them for eight months in a terrestrial environment. "There’s anecdotal evidence that they move on land from ephemeral pond to ephemeral pond [when they dry up]," Standen says, "but they don’t do it voluntarily." Still, that was more than enough to attempt to raise these young fish on land. "We used high-speed video to analyze their movements at the end of the eight-month period," Standen says.

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