Two fossil-hunting paleontologists named Ted Daeschler and Neil Shubin from North central Pennsylvania discovered a fossil of a fish with fingers in its fins. They found this rock near the Susquehanna River by the side of a road in 1995. This finding could cause the rewriting of textbooks all around the world. Throughout history, people have concluded that fingers did not evolve until the creatures made the transition to land 360 million years ago. The chance that fingers evolved in the water could re-categorize the invertebrate evolutionary theories.

Daeschler, from the Academy of Sciences, and Shubin, from the University of Pennsylvania, found a wrist-like joint and eight long bones that would have been inside the fins. There were also scales seen in the rock that prove the creature to be a fish and nor an amphibian. Usually, in land creatures, fingers are separate. However, in the fossil fish, the fingers are all enclosed in a flap of skin that would probably function as a paddle. They research that this fish was six feet long, and a link from the fish and land animals in the evolutionary track.

The fins are similar to those found in creatures called tetrapods, the animals that developed into the land vertebrate animals. The scientists predict from their discovery that fingers go all the way back to the Devonian era, long before land animals evolved.

The area where they discovered the fossil was 10 miles near Williamsport and 195 miles from Philadelphia. Inside a rock formation, called the Catskill Formation, is a layer of sandstone full of fossils. This formation is exactly what the paleontologists were trying to examine. Through research, the scientists know that this layer of sandstone was laid down during the Devonian Era, the age of the fishes, between 400 and 360 million years ago. During the age of the fish, the land was filled with plants and insects, and amphibians began to emerge in the end of the era. The closeness of the discovery makes the scientists all over Pennsylvania very proud of their findings and could change the way humans look at the change from fish to amphibians.

Daeschler and Shubin have been traveling across the region with funding from the National Geographic Society. They examined rocks that had already been over turned by road workers. When the two saw the familiar fin-like fossils, they figured it wasn't that important because the fin was hidden within the rock. They owe their discovery to the Penn- DOT roadcutters who use dynamite to explode pieces of the road. Daeschler insisted that they take a closer look in a laboratory and later Shubin felt very ashamed of his negativity. Daeschler was showing his three-year-old daughter the rock when he saw the fin structure underneath a piece of rock that had been farther removed. The other fin was not there and they still don't know why the other part of the body looked like. Some modern day fish resemble the structure, such as the coelacanth and the lungfish, bother considered lobe fish. All of them have lobes like pectoral fins.

In the year of 1840, in northern Pennsylvania, a discovery of a fossil of a fish showed slight resemblance of fingers but it was too poor a preservation to make an assumption.

Shubin and Daeschler are amazed at the idea of the structure's function in the early fish. Instead of front fins used for steering, this is the idea of locomotion. They suggested that the fish used its "fingers" to propel its huge body along the swampy ocean floor. The fish is unnamed right now, but could change some concluded evolutionary thought. They think that animals didn't mechanically acquire new parts, but used already existing parts for new things. At some point in history, these lobed finned fish spent more time on land and developed the ability to survive in a drier environment. Tetrapod then evolved, which led into the emergence of dinosaurs, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals.

Our history is severely effected by this discovery and the theory of evolution could be further developed. Modern knowledge could soon replace the world wide information about how man came to be.