Article: When feet had seven toes. (Icthyostega - primitive amphibian)

When feet had seven toes

Paleontologits have discovered something unexpected at the end of a 360-million-year-old leg: two extra toes. Since the 1930s, scientits have believed that Icthyostega, one of the earliest known amphibians, crawled around on five-toed feet. But fossil finds from Greenland now indicate that Icthyostega had seven toes on each hind foot. What's more, fossils from Acanthostega, another primitive amphibian, reveal it had eight fingers on each forelimb, according a report in the Sept. 6 NATURE by Michael I. Coates and Jennifer A. Clack of the University of Cambridge in England.

These early amphibians lived at the end of the Devonian ...

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