Chapter 1: Finding Your Inner Fish

Just as everyone else had said, I too had the reaction of "Oh my gosh, I can't believe we are going to read a book on a fish!", but once I began reading I realized that this book wasn't as bad as I had intended it to be. Chapter one was a pleasant surprise for me because I thought it was going to be written as though we were learning from a text book of evolution, but it seemed as though it was written in a way that Shubin was trying to teach us/the reader by using pictures and diagrams. Also the way that Shubin wrote showed us not only his knowledge in what he was studying, but also his love for the artifacts that he was finding. Moving on to the actual novel, I found it interesting when Shubin kept saying how fishes and humans were so similar because when I think of the two I think of a human breathing through their lungs as for fish having to use their gills. When Shubin began talking about how every rock has its own story to tell, I though that he was treating his work as though he was obsessed, but I soon came to realize that through his way of researching it made more sense as to how different rocks and fossils belong to its own kind. I also found it so interesting on how he used the Tiktaalik to show us how similar the human body and the fish’s body evolved in build as well as anatomy. This novel also opened my eyes on how hard paleontologists have to work to find these bones of all sorts of shapes and sizes and their dedication to doing so. I am actually looking forward to reading more about all the ways that humans have evolved over the past hundred of decades.