Finding your inner fish:D

Well, frankly i wasn't very excited to start my summer off by reading. I wasn't very fond of reading about science either but this book will be the only exception. It made science not science HAHAH. The language was very colloquial it was as if he and myself were engaging in a really long conversation using a bunch of analogies and other methods to make science more engaging.

This book is also surprisingly more like literature, a book us students would read in english, with its Shubin telling us stories about how he and his group uncovered the Tiktaalik.

At first I was actually really happy that there were pictures because it made the load seem lighter, but after really taking a look at it, it really draws us closer to the novel; personally it made it more engaging and helped describe difficult concepts (Especially the one with the differentiation between a fish, the new fossil, and the tetrapod).

Even though science is mostly boring, I was hoping that there would be lots of interesting concepts and it did not let me down. What I thought most interesting was just the basic idea of how the Tiktaalik is the animal which is in between the fish and the primitive land animals, it shows us new insight about even our very own history "as fish".

While also being a rather engaging and entertaining novel, it also did its job of teaching the reader. It reminded me about basic fossil ideas such as most fossils are likely to preserve in sedimentary rocks and the process. It also taught me about the difference of the fish and the primitive land animals: the fish's head is conical while the primitive land animals have flat heads with their eyes being on top. I also picked up from the book that a paleontologists life isn't the greatest life to live, especially as they went through many hardships especially when they went to the Canadian Artic.

-Kevin Chun