Last week’s announcement of Tiktaalik roseae, a transitional fossil between fishes and land vertebrates, received wide coverage. The discovery also received the rare honor of being a science story that the editors of The New York Times deemed the most important story of the day (right side, above the fold). You can read the Nature papers and additional commentary here. Carl Zimmer, whose book At the Water’s Edge is as good an account of this area of research for non-specialists as one could hope for, weighs in here.