Nunavut’s rich fossil record has a new star, Qikiqtania Wakei about 365 million years old.
It is named for the Qikiqtani region of Nunavut, where it was found, and for the late David Wake, a noted evolutionary biologist.
“Some of the fossils that come out of Ellesmere Island and northern Canada are so important to 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 Qikiqtania in the journal Nature.
Millions of years ago, it was a different world: when Qikiqtania lived in the polar region, the now treeless land would have resembled today’s Amazon River Delta.
Tom Stewart, an assistant professor at Penn State, examines the Qikiqtania fossil. (Stephanie Sang)
There were fish in its waters, some of which had begun to move towards land.
But among the fish that have left behind fossils, Qikiqtania has revealed itself to be a new creature.
“It’s exciting for a couple of reasons,” Stewart said.
They knew Qikiqtania was new and “also something very unusual,” he said.
“From a first impression, we can say that this is an animal that is closely related to the first animals that had fingers and toes.”
But the fins of Qikiqtania showed that it was quite different from these first animals.
This is because they have not seen any muscles that should be moved on land.
“He was doing something very different. This fish was not [out of the water.] We think this is the evolution of a fish that lived on land,” he said.
Looking at the animals today, Stewart said it’s not “so crazy” to think of fish moving from water to land or back and forth over time.
Neil Shubin, a professor of biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, stands on Ellesmere Island, where he discovered the Kikiktania and Tiktaalik fossils days apart in 2004. (Edward Deschler)
Some frogs also live entirely in water, while others live mostly on land, he said.
But to see a similar dynamic happening so long ago, through Qikiqtania, was “really exciting and unexpected for us,” Stewart said.
But the revelation was not immediate.
It began in 2004 on a trip to Ellesmere near the eastern arm of Byrd Fjord, where Neil Shubin, now at the University of Chicago, had picked up the fossil, which was lying exposed on the ground.
Team members walked the rocks on the hillsides, looking for a particular color or texture that might indicate a fossil.
In the case of Qikiqtania, the fish’s scales were white and had ridges on them, so they knew there was a fossil.
In 2004, the fossil was collected and taken south, along with hundreds of others, for extensive study.
Finally, two years ago, Stewart and his team brought the fossil to Shubin’s lab for computed tomography.
“We could look in the fossil record and see a lot of preserved parts of the animal that we didn’t know existed,” Stewart said, adding that it was new but “also something very unusual.”
This image shows the preserved jaws and scales from the Qikiqtania fossil. (Tom Stewart)
Fossils of an ancient species of fish, Tiktaalik roseae, were also found on this 2004 trip to Ellesmere.
Tiktaalik is one of the most famous ancient transitional species between fish and land-dwelling tetrapods, or animals with two pairs of limbs.
Both Kikiktania and Tiktalik will remain in the Nunavut Fossil Collection at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa until a museum facility can take them home.
The Qikiqtani research took place thanks to the people of Resolute Bay and Grise Fjord, the Ivik hunters and trappers of Grise Fjord, and the Nunavut Department of Heritage and Culture.
To them – and on behalf of the entire research team, Stewart said “nakurmiik”.
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