Nope, me neither! I speak some very rusty Japanese and a little Swedish, but can not claim to “parle français” myself. Despite this, I was a co-author on a French language article published last week by the journal Médecine/Sciences.
The article, L’origine phylogénétique des doigts, can be translated as “The phylogenetic origin of fingers”, and covers our work on the fish with fingers, Elpistostege. Our first article was published in Nature earlier this year, and you can read my original blog post about it too.
This new article was co-authored with Prof. Richard Cloutier and Prof. John Long and details our discovery of the first occurrence of digits in a fish, even though the pectoral fin of Elpistostege still retains primitive features, such as the presence of rays. The specimen is just the fourth Elpistostege fossil known. It was discovered by Richard and his team in 2010 in Miguasha, Quebec, Canada, and is about 375 million years old.
So if you’re a Francophile, Gallophile, or just love fish fingers, get reading about good ol’ Elpistostege!
*** EDIT: more Elpi! This week a popular science article (in English) was published by The Science Breaker, a website that publish short lay-summaries (“breaks“) of scientific research. Our article “Elpistostege: a fish with legs or a tetrapod with fins?“, was again written by Richard, John and myself.
Dr Alice Clement 