• Question: what did fish evolve from

    Asked by 622evnb35 to Adam, Emily, Thad, Thomas on 12 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Thomas Clements

      Thomas Clements answered on 12 Mar 2015:

      Great question and the answer is nobody knows!!! If you want to be a palaeontologist then this is an area that a lot of people are interested in.

      Fish evolved around 480 million years ago but they didn’t look anything like they do now – they had no jaws and you wouldn’t want to eat one and they had big bone plates on their skin.

      It is most likely that they evolved from animals like the lamprey but this is still disputed and I know several people trying to answer this question.

    • Photo: Thaddeus Aid

      Thaddeus Aid answered on 12 Mar 2015:

      Hi,

      Thomas is the expert on this question but I can answer it a little bit. Originally there were only bacteria, little single cell organisms ruled the world! Eventually one became the ancestor of all plants and animals, but it was still a single cell organism. But it learned a trick! by clumping together these early cells learned that they could specialise and adapt to their world. Some of these became plants and some of them became the first animals, like sponges. Now as I understand it, these then started to learn how to control their movement and you started to see the first worm like creatures and those worm like creatures started to grow fins and gills and eventually they became the first fish!

      How cool is that?

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