“To stand at the Lucy site with Don Johanson and to be out in the field with Tim White,” he says, “was a real privilege.Why do we look the way we do? What does the human hand have in common with the wing of a fly? Are breasts, sweat glands, and scales connected in some way? To better understand the inner workings of our bodies and to trace the origins of many of today's most common diseases, we have to turn to unexpected sources: worms, flies, and even fish. It’s a fascinating journey, and Shubin introduces us along the way to some of the giants in modern paleontology-his counterparts in the search for crucial transitional creatures, and his own scientific heroes. Just as part 1 illustrates the legacy we still carry from our fishlike ancestors, the second and third installments reveal what we inherited from reptiles (our skin, teeth and ears in particular) and what we got from ancestral primates (hands, vision, brains, along with some less desirable traits such as weak backs and a poor sense of smell). The series is about more than just the search for Tiktaalik: parts 2 and 3 are titled Your Inner Reptile and Your Inner Monkey. That’s about as solid a demonstration of the scientific method in action as you could imagine. Darwin said such a creature must exist previously known fossils dictated when it must have lived and sure enough, there it was. Being there again, telling the story to a fresh audience right at that wonderful, magical place was just wonderful.” Equally wonderful is the bombproof logic of what they found and what it meant. “I worked that site for ten years,” Shubin told TIME, “so making the documentary was like a homecoming. It took years of painstaking searching, requiring return visits during the brief Arctic summer year after year for a full decade until, in the second week of July, 2004, they found what they were looking for. Something must have happened in that 40-million year gap to make the transition to land possible, and armed with the knowledge of the timeframe and the places in the world where sedimentary rock of the right age was accessible, Shubin and his team ended up on Ellesmere Island, in spectacularly remote and austere landscape not far from the northern tip of Greenland. They swam the world’s oceans 400 million years ago-and then, 40 million years later, the first amphibians were up on land. Fish, he reminds us, were the first animals with backbones, skulls and overall bony skeletons. The search for Tiktaalik was a scientific detective story, and that’s just how he lays it out. Part of the reason Your Inner Fish deserves your now fully human attention is that Shubin is such an engaging guide to what could otherwise be a dry and dusty topic, but which, thanks to his genial enthusiasm and clarity, is anything but.

Your inner fish series