This was front page news across the world in 2004. Currently both a professor at the University of Chicago and Provost of the Field Museum, his primary claim to fame was as the person who located in the Canadian Arctic, a fossil, Tiktaalik roseae, a flat-headed fish/amphibian that marked the transition of animals from sea to land. Paleontology, like Con Edison, swears by the motto “Dig we Must.” Shubin offers a quick intro into how one decides where one should dig to increase the odds of finding what you are looking for.

There is a wealth of fascinating material in this easy-to-read book on how human anatomy came to be. Neil Shubin with Tiktaalik or the other way around - image from the Chicago Tribune Neil Shubin follows both paths on his road to our past in a book that demonstrates popular science writing at its best. One can look at fossils to see how we got from there, waaaay back there, to here, and one can also find, in comparing embryos of different species, evidence of our developmental history. How are embryos like fossils? How did we come to have the hands, arms, heads, bone structures, ears, eyes and many of the other parts we have? It turns out that homo sap is a very jury-rigged critter, an accumulation of biological compromises and re-purposed parts.

Your Inner Fish is science writing at its finest-enlightening, accessible, and told with irresistible enthusiasm. Shubin makes us see ourselves and our world in a completely new light. By examining fossils and DNA, Shubin shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our head is organized like that of a long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genome look and function like those of worms and bacteria. Neil Shubin, a leading paleontologist and professor of anatomy who discovered Tiktaalik-the 'missing link' that made headlines around the world in April 2006-tells the story of evolution by tracing the organs of the human body back millions of years, long before the first creatures walked the earth. Why do we look the way we do? What does the human hand have in common with the wing of a fly? Are breasts, sweat glands, and scales connected in some way? To better understand the inner workings of our bodies and to trace the origins of many of today's most common diseases, we have to turn to unexpected sources: worms, flies, and even fish.

My inner fish book