Analysis Of Pbs's Documentary Great Transformations

Issac Leib Peretz once said, “Time is change, transformation, evolution. Time is eternal sprouting, blossoming, the eternal tomorrow.” In PBS’s Documentary Great Transformations, the transformation from the first living organism to what we are today was discussed and how most organisms have very similar genes and characteristics. How fish used to colonize land and land mammals evolved to sea creatures.

For instance, the whale, the biggest mammal that lives in the water, was found to have had legs and used to dwell on land millions of years ago. While in Pakistan, Phil Gingrich, a geologist and paleontologist, came across a fossil that resembled that of a wolf but had a “bump” on the back of the skull which was found to part of an inner ear,

After searching she returned with four tons of rock and spent four years searching through them. When she was done, she had the most complete early tetrapod skeleton ever found. She soon discovered that the complete tetrapod was of Acanthostega, the first, earliest tetrapod that was found to have fingers.

Acanthostega had a fish-like tail and gills for breathing under water, this being the aquatic part of it. But at the ends of the arms were “peddle-shaped” appendages, thought to be the first “hands” on Earth. Clack’s discovery proved that some fish had arms and legs in the water. It showed that arms and legs were already evolved before organisms started actually living on land, they were used more for survival than walking. In a sense, the “blueprints” of an arm were already in place.

It wasn’t just Acanthostega that was an “evolved” fish, there were plenty of others that evolved to adapt for survival. Some developed big jaws with even bigger teeth, some developed a tough armor, others developed sharp spikes, and numerous other developments. It was thought that was the reason the Acanthostega had arms and legs, to get out of the way of the other

That “prehistoric” whales had the jaw of a wolf (a fifty million year old wolf to be exact) and the ear of a whale. I think that all of our semiaquatic mammals play a big part in the evolution of land mammals to water mammals. Like at some point of say an otter’s life, nature told it to stop evolving so that it wouldn’t become completely marine, but semiaquatic as we named it. How did it know when to stop evolving? Was it changes in the environment? Or the need for survival? Which brings around another question, how did we go from a planet of just rock and magma, to a planet thriving with