Eusthenopteron Pronunciation

Fun Facts

• ✓The bones inside Eusthenopteron's front fins map almost perfectly onto your own arm: one bone at the top like your humerus, then two bones side by side like your radius and ulna, then smaller bones mirroring your wrist.
• ✓Eusthenopteron fossils from Miguasha in Quebec are so well preserved and so numerous that scientists have been able to reconstruct the animal's entire growth cycle from juvenile to adult, one of the most complete growth series known for any Devonian fish.
• ✓Despite being shown in textbooks for over a century as a fish crawling onto land, modern paleontologists now believe Eusthenopteron was a fully aquatic predator that never left the water, making it one of the most famously misrepresented animals in science history.
• ✓Eusthenopteron had internal nostrils called choanae, a feature shared with all land vertebrates including you, which allowed it to smell underwater and is a key piece of evidence linking it to the ancestry of four-limbed animals.
• ✓The Miguasha fossil site in Quebec where Eusthenopteron was discovered is so scientifically important that UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site in 1999, largely because of the remarkable fish fossils found there.