By examining fossils from a prehistoric fish, two Swedish scientis have concluded that our ears evolved from an organ once used for breathing. The fish, Panderichthys, was precursor to the first tetrapod, the animal that crawled onto land and eventually spawned all four-legged vertebrates, including humans (aka Darwin fish).
A bottom dweller, Panderichthys or Darwin fish, had a spiracle, a tube for breathing water through the top of its head while its face was buried in the mud. From the spiracle's anatomy and its position in the head relative to the fish's unusually short jawbone (a known ancestor of the modern ear's stirrup bone) scientists deduced that it was a precursor to a fully deveoped middle ear.
"It's a great fill-in-the-gap story that shows a nice transition stage at an important point in evolution." Mark Wesneat told the Washington Post.
This discovery is a repudiation of the claim by advocates of intelligent design that the ear is so complicated,it could only have been created by God or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
"In my opinion this is another nail in the coffin of the creationist view," Westneat said.
