Chapter Two: Getting a Grip

In chapter 2, I liked the picture on page 31. That picture helped me understand what Shubin meant when he said one bone, followed by two bones, then little blobs, then fingers or toes. He labeled the different parts of the human arm and also notice that he colored the humerus black, the ulna and the radius gray, and he left the wrist bones and digits white. This really helped because if you look at the other pictures below, it helped me identify which bones were which. I thought it was really clever of Shubin to color different bones different colors so that he would not have to label all of them for each animal.

This chapter was interesting overall and it taught me alot. I learned that Tiktaalik had a wrist because it needed to move throughout its environment (shallow streams/ponds and mudflats). I find it amazing how it took hundreds of millions of years to develop our wrists to make them the way they are now. Just knowing this makes me appreciate my hands and wrists a little more. Before reading this chapter I honestly did not find my wrists so appealing. At the beginning of this chapter I had no idea why Shubin would find the hand as a personal, and emotional connection between him and the body he was dissecting. If it were me, I would find that connection through the brain because the brain controls everything of a human body and it is one of the vital organs that a human needs to survive. But, by the end of the chapter, I started to see why our hands are important. Our hands are important because it relates humans to Tiktaalik.

- Nirav Patel