Look down at your own hands. The bones in your wrists and fingers have a history that reaches back to ancient fish. In the late 1990s, Neil Shubin went to the Canadian High Arctic to find evidence of that connection. He needed rocks about 375 million years old, laid down when rivers crossed a landscape now deep in the polar north. Somewhere in that stone, he hoped to find a fish whose anatomy could help explain the transition toward life on land.
Looking for fossils in the Arctic takes a stubborn kind of patience. Before anyone lifts a rock, there are geological maps to study and exposed formations of the right age to find. Then comes the fieldwork: hauling gear into remote camps and spending summer after summer searching, knowing you might go home without the animal you came to find.
In 2004, during their fourth Arctic expedition, a team led by Neil, Ted Daeschler, and Farish Jenkins found Tiktaalik roseae on Ellesmere Island. It had scales and fins like a fish, yet its skeleton held features familiar from animals that walk on land. It had a flat head and a mobile neck. Inside its front fins sat an upper arm bone, two forearm bones, and parts of a wrist.
Those jointed fins suggest that Tiktaalik could prop itself up in the shallows. It is a close relative near this great evolutionary transition rather than a known direct ancestor of ours. Its skeleton shows how parts of the anatomy later used for walking developed in water. The bone arrangement that lets us hold a coffee cup or focus a camera lens has roots in an ancient stream.
I photographed Neil on a biting cold day in Chicago in December 2025. His office at the University of Chicago was filled with fossils and plaster casts, including models of the fish that brought those Arctic expeditions to the attention of the world. He had been nominated for the presidency of the National Academy of Sciences, and we were making portraits ahead of the election.
The room was formal, yet Neil seemed completely at ease. I immediately noticed his heavy winter boots under the conference table. If you have spent enough time in the polar regions, you recognize that footwear right away. Even in a suit on campus, he looked ready to shoulder a pack and head north. When we talked about Ellesmere Island, he spoke with the unmistakable pleasure of someone who knows both how hard the Arctic can be and why you always want to go back.
Neil brings that same clarity to human anatomy. Teaching the subject to medical students helped him recognize how much more sense our bodies make when we trace their structures through other animals. His book Your Inner Fish brought that perspective to a wide audience, helping people recognize deep evolutionary history inside their own skin and bones.
He was elected president of the National Academy of Sciences in February 2026 and took office that July. I think back to his office and the cast of that ancient fish. Within its fins was the evidence he had traveled north to find, part of a deep history we carry with us every time we reach for something.
