Henry Gee
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Many more fossils have been found since.
And he kept not writing the definitive monograph.
And I asked him why he hadn't done it.
He said, because the more you look at it, the weirder it gets.
The less and less like a vertebrate ancestor.
Now, Picard is not the earliest vertebrate.
It's an offshoot somewhere, because there were all sorts of weird things that weren't vertebrates.
But the earliest vertebrates, and we could call them fish,
were at the Chengjiang fauna.
There's one called hycoicthus, and there's another called millocamingia.
And these were the earliest known fish.
These are the first fish in the world.
They had no paired fins.
If they had a backbone, it was just cartilaginous.
They had no hard parts.
And this is why it took exceptional preservation in places like the Chengjiang Fauna to show them up at all.
They were, you know, small, about the size of an anchovy or maybe small, real tiddlers, like a...
you know, wide-baked thighs.
Yeah, or even smaller.