The Washington Post, January 19th, 2006
Question: What do you do with half an ear? Answer: You breathe through it. That's the conclusion reached by a pair of researchers who say they have found a fossil "snapshot" of the ear partway through its evolution to its current form. The structure that became the sound-conducting middle ear of land animals began as a tube that permitted ancient shallow-water fish to take an occasional breath of air out of the top of their heads -- at least according to Martin D. Brazeau and Per E. Ahlberg of Uppsala University, in Sweden. Their conclusion is controversial, as it amounts to a radical reinterp...
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