Nunavut’s rich fossil record has a new star, the roughly 365-million-year-old Qikiqtania Wakei.
It was named for the Qikiqtani region of Nunavut, where it was found, and for the late David Wake, an acclaimed evolutionary biologist.
“Some of the fossils coming out of Ellesmere Island and northern Canada are so important to how scientists and people in general understand this period of life on Earth,” said Tom Stewart, an assistant professor at Penn State, which recently reported on Qikiqtania in the journal Nature.
Millions of years ago, it was a different world: when Qikiqtania lived in the polar region, the now treeless land would have resembled the present-day Amazon River Delta.
Tom Stewart, an assistant professor at Penn State, looks at the Qikiqtania fossils. (Stephanie Sang)
There were fish in its waters, some of which had begun to move ashore.
But among those fish that left fossil traces, Qikiqtania has revealed itself as a new creature.
“It’s exciting for a few reasons,” Stewart said.
They knew Qikiqtania was new and “also something very unusual,” he said.
“From a first impression, we could say that it was an animal closely related to the first animals that had fingers and toes.”
But Qikiqtania’s fins showed that it was quite different from those early animals.
That’s because they didn’t see any muscles that would have had to move on the ground.
“It was doing something very different. Not this fish [out of the water.] We think this was the evolution of a fish that used to live on land,” he said.
Looking at animals today, Stewart said it’s “not that crazy” to think of a fish moving from water to land or back and forth over time.
Neil Shubin, Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago, is on Ellesmere Island where he discovered fossils of Qikiqtania and Tiktaalik days apart in 2004. (Edward Daeschler)
Some frogs also live entirely in water, while others live primarily on land, he said.
But to see a similar dynamic play out so long ago, through Qikiqtania, was “really exciting and unexpected for us,” Stewart said.
But the revelation was not immediate.
It started on a 2004 trip to Ellesmere, near the eastern arm of Bird Fiord, where Neil Shubin, now at the University of Chicago, had collected the fossil, which was exposed on the ground.
Team members would walk the rocks on the hillsides looking for a particular color or texture that might indicate a fossil.
In the case of Qikiqtania, the fish scales were white and had bumps, so they knew there was a fossil.
In 2004, the fossil was bundled up and brought south, along with hundreds of others, for detailed study.
Finally, two years ago, Stewart and his team brought the fossil to Shubin’s lab for a CT scan.
“We could look inside the fossil and see a lot of preserved parts of the animal that we didn’t know existed,” Stewart said, adding that it was new but “also something very unusual.”
This image shows the preserved jaws and scales of the Qikiqtania fossil. (Tom Stewart)
Fossils of an ancient fish species Tiktaalik roseae were also found during that 2004 trip to Ellesmere.
Tiktaalik is one of the earliest known transitional species between fish and terrestrial tetrapods, or animals with two pairs of limbs.
Both Qikiqtania and Tiktalik will remain in the Nunavut fossil collection at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa until a museum facility can house them.
Research on Qikiqtani was carried out thanks to people from Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord, the Iviq Hunters and Trappers of Grise Fiord and the Nunavut Department of Heritage and Culture.
To them, and on behalf of the entire research team, Stewart said “nakurmiik.”