How do other people do this? How do paleontologists make discoveries? How do we do the same thing with genes? Ultimately, it's the story of people making discoveries. It is the discovery narrative, the human story of how a few people- Ted Daeschler and Farish Jenkins, who is no longer with us, sadly-came together to make this discovery. With TV, there's a one-microsecond-long moment before the thumb flicks to the sports channel instead.īut you're telling the same story as the book in a sense, just with more elements? Readers will give you a chapter or two before they jettison the book. With TV, it's 56 minutes and you're done. You want to say something, you add another chapter. What were the challenges of telling the story of Tiktaalik, and human evolution, on television? How can we interleave graphics to camerawork, interviews with scientists, encounters with real fossils? How can we leverage all that to tell the story in a different and possibly even more powerful way? So I spent a lot time thinking about the written word.

But the reason I was so excited, and scared, was this: Can we use the unique opportunities of that medium to tell the story? Why a TV series? You already have written a best-selling book. The series looks at how evolution shaped Tiktaalik, the human form, and much more. National Geographic caught up with the University of Chicago's Shubin, who unreels the story in a three-part series based on his best-selling book, Your Inner Fish (PBS, 10 p.m. (Related: ' How We Got on Land, Bone by Bone.') Unearthed in the Canadian Arctic, the fossil 'fishapod' once flopped on land with surprisingly agile fins and a flexible neck, a forerunner to today's four-limbed land animals. The project was partially supported by the National Geographic Society. (See: ' Our Fishy Ancestors Had Fins Made for Walking.')īut Tiktaalik was acclaimed as a beautiful scientific discovery when it was announced in 2006 by paleontologist Neil Shubin and his team. Icons of evolution don't come much uglier than Tiktaalik, the land-walking ancient fish from 375 million years ago.

Evolution your inner fish