Fishing in your classroom
Do humans come from fish?
The fossil that taught the world the answer was found in Gaspésie. Not in Africa, not in China — a four-hour drive from Rimouski.
Where was the fish that came out of the water found?
What did that fish look like?
Are there other fish like that?
So do humans come from fish?
Which is the oldest fish still alive?
Why “beware the shortcut”?
How long is 370 million years?
Three hundred and seventy million years is impossible to picture. One marker: if the whole history of Earth fitted into a 24-hour day, the fish of Miguasha would show up around 9:40 p.m., and humans in the last second before midnight.
For the teacher
- Have the class hold out an arm: one bone, then two, then the fingers. The same pattern is in the fin of Eusthenopteron, 370 million years old, found in Gaspésie.
- Tiktaalik is the other Canadian one, from Nunavut. Its name was chosen with the local Inuit community and means “large freshwater fish”. A reminder that naming a fossil is also a decision about whose language is used.
- The coelacanth card is the one to linger on. “Living fossil” is a phrase everyone has heard and specialists reject: nothing stops evolving. Unlearning a catchy phrase is worth as much as learning a new one.
- The 24-hour analogy is computed, not rounded off: 370 million years on a 4.5-billion-year Earth lands at 10 p.m., and our species in the last six seconds.