About 360 million years ago, as any schoolchild who knows his prehistoric zoology can tell you, some adventurous fish managed to hoist themselves onto their stubby fins and crawl clumsily out of the swamps to forage for food. Once these primeval creatures were on terra firma, their offspring began to adapt to their new environment, natural selection (over tens of millions of years) favoring those that developed features well suited to life on land: paws, hooves, knees, joints, fingers and thumbs. Thus, as generations of schoolchildren have learned, did these marine creatures give rise to frogs, birds, dinosaurs and all the...
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