Nunavut's ancient Qikiqtania fish fossil helps shed new light on evolution

Nunavut's rich fossil record has a new star, the roughly 365-million-year-old Qikiqtania Wakei.

It was named after the Qikiqtani region of Nunavut, where it was found, and the late David Wake, an acclaimed evolutionary biologist.

"Some of the fossils that are coming out of Ellesmere Island and northern Canada are so important for how we as scientists and people in general understand this period of life on earth," said Tom Stewart, an assistant professor at Penn State, who recently reported about Qikiqtania in the journal Nature.

Millions of years back, it was a different world: When Qikiqtania lived in the polar region, the now-treeless land would have resembled today's Amazon River delta.

In its waters were fish, some of which had started to move on to the land.

But, among those fish which left behind fossil traces, Qikiqtania has revealed itself to be a new creature.

"It's exciting for a few reasons," Stewart said.

They knew Qikiqtania was new and "also something very unusual," he said.

"From a first impression, we could tell this was an animal that is closely related to the first animals that had fingers and toes. "

But Qikiqtania's fins showed it was quite different from those first animals.

That's because they didn't see any muscles which would have needed to be move onto land.

"It was doing something very different. This fish was not [out of the water.] We think this was the evolution of a fish that used to live on the ground," he said.

Looking at animals today, Stewart said it's not "so crazy" to think of a fish transitioning from water to land or back and forth over time.

Some frogs also live wholly in the water, while others live mainly on the land, he said.

But to see a similar dynamic taking place so long ago, through Qikiqtania, was "really exciting and unexpected for us," Stewart said.

But the revelation wasn't immediate.

It started on a 2004 trip to Ellesmere near the eastern arm of Bird Fiord, where Neil Shubin, now at the University of Chicago, had picked up the fossil, which was lying exposed on the ground.

Members of the team would walk on the rocks on hillsides looking for a particular colour or texture that might indicate a fossil.

In the case of Qikiqtania, the scales of the fish were white and they had bumps on them, so they knew there was a fossil.

In 2004, the fossil was bundled up and taken south, along with hundreds of others, for painstaking study.

Finally two years ago, Stewart and his team brought the fossil to Shubin's laboratory for a CT scan.

"We could look inside the fossil and see a whole lot of preserved parts of the animal that we didn't know existed," said Stewart, adding it was new but "also something very unusual."

Fossils of an ancient fish species Tiktaalik roseae were also found during that 2004 trip to Ellesmere.

Tiktaalik is one of the best-known ancient transitional species between fish and land-dwelling tetrapods, or animals with two pairs of limbs.

Both Qikiqtania and Tiktalik will remain at the Nunavut fossil collection of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa until a museum facility can welcome them home.

Research on Qikiqtani took place thanks to people in Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord, the Iviq Hunters and Trappers of Grise Fiord, and Nunavut's Department of Heritage and Culture.

To them— and on behalf of the entire research team, Stewart said "nakurmiik."