National Academy of Sciences: Recipient, Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal, 2008
"For studies of the first terrestrial vertebrates and the water-to-land transition, as illuminated in her book Gaining Ground."
Book Description
"The journey our ancestors made from the sea to dry land is one of the greatest transformation in the history of life, and Gaining Ground documents it magnificently. This should come as no surprise, since Jennifer Clack has been revolutionizing our understanding of this crucial evolutionary episode for years now. In Gaining Ground, she decodes a wonderful tale encrypted in fossils, genes, and flesh." --Carl Zimmer, author of At the Water's Edge
Around 370 million years ago, a distant relative of a modern lungfish began the most exciting adventure the world had ever seen: it emerged from the sea and lay claim to the land. Over the next 70 million years, this tentative beachhead had become of worldwide colonization by any ever-increasing variety of four-limbed life. These first ãtetrapodsä are the ancestors of all vertebrate life on land. This book tells the story of their emergence and evolution.
