Chapter One: Finding Your Inner Fish

My expectations for this book was that it was going to be just a list of connections, linking past species to present ones, and data collected from different discoveries he has made. But while I was reading I began to realize this wasn’t the case. I admire that this book is about his experiences as a paleontologist and his contributions to the science field. In the beginning of the first chapter it was basic knowledge of how fossil finding works. I believe this was a perfect way to start the book. He explains the difficult process of fossil finding to have us realize why his discovery is so significant and why there are so little discoveries like this. While he is explaining the process, which can be a little heavily detailed and confusing, he uses similes of everyday objects so that the readers truly know what he is talking about. He stresses the scarcity of fossils being preserved and found. His own experiences in the Artic and his past failures give even more stress on that finding fossils is a tough and demanding job that isn’t always successful. But I’m glad he had his success with Tiktaalik and drew even closer to his discovery of the origin of land-living animals. I’m excited to see what other connections and discoveries he makes to connecting Tiktaalik to the origin of land-living animals and see how far he goes into that past.