Clarifying the evolutionary process of aquatic animals moving to land.

American biologists announced on April 17th that they have successfully decoded the DNA of an ancient coelacanth species through living fossils of the fish, providing further clues to explain the habitat changes that led some aquatic animals to move onto land millions of years ago.

The results of this remarkable study have been published in the prestigious British journal Nature.

By analyzing the genome of the coelacanth, scientists found 3 million characters of DNA, which is the same size as the human genome.

Coelacanth. (Source: biolib.cz)

According to scientist Jessica Alfoeldi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, the genes of this fish species generally evolve much more slowly than those of all other fish and terrestrial vertebrates.

New research on the genome of the coelacanth suggests that this fish is more closely related to tetrapods than the freshwater lungfish previously discovered in Australia and Africa.

The new findings also confirm that coelacanths are a unique source for studying the evolutionary process of aquatic animals transitioning to land. Their genes can help explain these changes, including how these land-dwelling fish developed a sense of smell to detect air and food, and how their immune systems changed to respond to bacteria and viruses in their new environment.

Coelacanths were once thought to have become extinct around 65 million years ago, around the same time as the dinosaurs. However, this theory was refuted when a coelacanth was found in South Africa in 1938. Since then, 308 other coelacanths have been discovered.

According to scientists, the decoding of the coelacanth's genome has yielded surprising findings for the scientific community over the past century, shedding further light on the study of aquatic animals moving onto land.

According to (VNA) - VT