This Gives New Meaning To 'Fish Face'

It's easy to imagine that all animals have always had faces, but they haven't — and yours evolved from a fish. Really. Evolutionists have determined that the human face can be traced back to a primordial ancestor, an eight-inch fish that swam the seas 415 million years ago. The Swedish and French researchers’ report, published in the most recent issue of Nature, examines the development of fish to human face in three distinctive phases.

Although previous research had already demonstrated that human faces are descended from bony fish, which bear the same complicated jaw infrastructure, it's the first time that scientists have captured the evolutionary process of all animals' faces, including the human face.

So what did our face-ancestor look like, exactly? Well, the evolutionists described it as a mixture of primitive and modern, with a small spine and two crushing bite plates in place of teeth. To analyze its facial development, the researchers scanned fossils of the small fish, called Romundia, and digitally-imaged it from three angles.

Researchers characterized the evolution from fish to face in three defined stages: first, the transition from a single nostril to two separate nostrils; second, the formation of a nose structure between the eyes; and third, the diminishing of the fish’s bulky upper lip and a lengthening of its facial tissue. And, ta-da — the face arrives!

One of the researchers, paleontologist Vincent Dupret of Uppsala University in Sweden, described the evolutionary resemblance between the prehistoric fish and its human descendant in uncanny terms:

When you look at Romundina, it’s like looking at yourself in the mirror, but with a 415 million-year-old image. It’s like in a science-fiction movie. You look at the mirror, but it’s not you. It’s your ancestor.

The new evolutionary discovery will set off ripples in academic circles — but meanwhile, scores of charter and private schools receiving public tax dollars continue to teach creationism in 13 states and the District of Columbia.

Last week, creationism took a fresh hit. On Feb. 8, "Science Guy" Bill Nye stood up for the scientific validity of evolution when debating Ken Ham, the president of Kentucky’s Creationism Museum.

Much of the debate focused on science versus religious creationism, and Nye and Ham's back-and-forth attracted quite a bit of attention. At one point, half of Twitter's trending topics related to the debate itself. Some of the buzz was positive; others felt the exchange didn't live up to its hype.

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