��������

Inspiration from �������� Interim Co-Director Neil Shubin's landmark book on vertebrate evolution,��, plus skate embryos provided to scientist Jeremy Dasen by the �������� Marine Resources Center, have led to an intriguing discovery about the neurological origins of walking -- in the ocean. ()

... In other words, some animals may have had the neural pathways necessary for walking even before they lived on land.

��today in the journal��Cell, the new research began with a basic question: how did different motor behaviors evolve or change in various species over time? Author��Jeremy Dasen, an associate professor at the NYU Neuroscience Institute, had previously worked on the movement of snakes. He was inspired to look into skates after reading Neil Shubin’s book,��, but didn’t really know where to start.

“I had no idea what a skate looked like,” Dasen says. “I’d eaten it in a restaurant before. So I did what everyone does, I went onto Google to find videos of skates.” One of the first things he found was a��Youtube video��of a clearnose skate engaging in walking behavior. “I was like, wow, that’s really cool! How does it do that?” he says.

Using skates collected by the��Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Dasen and others endeavored to find out.��