 An artist's reconstruction of Elpistostege watsoni. (Katrina Kenny) | Here's some non-virus news from the world of science. Found: A fossilized fish with fingerlike appendages. The five-foot-long fish, named Elpistostege watsoni, was discovered in Canada. It lived during the Late Devonian period, 393 million to 359 million years ago, when fish like this one began wading out of shallow water onto land. This Elpistostege specimen, described Wednesday in the journal Nature, is remarkably well-preserved for its age. Buried in the skeletal pattern of its fore-fin are what anatomy experts see as precursors to fingers: A fan of slender bones, two that convincingly appear to be digits and three more that could also fit the definition. "This is the first time that we have unequivocally discovered fingers locked in a fin with fin-rays in any known fish. The articulating digits in the fin are like the finger bones found in the hands of most animals," said study author John Long, a paleontologist at Flinders University, in a statement. "This finding pushes back the origin of digits in vertebrates to the fish level," Long said, "and tells us that the patterning for the vertebrate hand was first developed deep in evolution, just before fishes left the water." | 
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