Neil Shubin: So, I've been interested pretty much throughout my entire career in the great transitions in the history of life and how the big steps in evolution happen. So, I wonder if we could just jump right into it and there's quite a story about how you got to but can you just summarize what it is the discovery or the finding that you had and what it actually has led to in terms of thinkings. Why do our bodies look the way they do and to that we have to get some really big discoveries but also big issues big ideas?

I mean I'm interested in the big questions of the history of life and you know, why does the world look the way it does. And I think of the guests that we have that actually could say, this is really something that really does change the way you're likely to see the world, yours really kind of falls smack in the middle of that doesn't it. Paul Rand: You know, part of what we try to think about on Big Brains is something that is a pretty monumental insight or discovery that leads to the way people end up seeing the world. Neil Shubin:Yeah, I'd love to think of it as discovery. So, Neil you've got quite an extraordinary history and is discovery the right word? I talked with Neil about how he uncovered Tiktaalik in the Arctic Circle after decades of searching and how that breakthrough is continuing to shape our understanding of human evolution. He's the best-selling author of “Your Inner Fish” which is based on his groundbreaking 2006 discovery of Tiktaalik, the three hundred seventy five-million-year-old fossil, that is considered a missing link between fish and humans. Neil Shubin is a University of Chicago paleontologist and evolutionary biologist. But did you know that it's an ancient fish you actually have to thank for it. Paul Rand: The human body is an amazing thing. Producer: From the University of Chicago, this is Big Brains with Paul Rand-conversations with pioneering thinkers that will change the way you see the world. University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin said he’ll never forget the day in 2004 when he unearthed the discovery of a lifetime.Īfter spending six years in the Arctic searching for a fossil that could be a missing link between sea and land animals, Shubin finally found himself eye-to-eye with the 375-million-year-old creature that would come to be known as Tiktaalik roseae.

The missing link in human evolution