Named after the Qikiqtani region of Nunavut, where it was found, and the late David Wake, an acclaimed evolutionary biologist. “Some of the fossils that come out of Ellesmere Island and northern Canada are so important to how we as scientists and people in general understand this period of life on earth,” said Tom Stewart, an assistant professor at Penn State who recently reported on Qikiqtania in the journal Nature. Tom Stewart, an assistant professor at Penn State, examines the Qikiqtania fossils. (Stephanie Sang) There were fish in its waters, some of which had begun to move towards land. But among those fish that left behind fossils, Qikiqtania was revealed to be a new creature. “It’s exciting for a couple of 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 it was quite different from those early animals. This is because they did not see any muscles that would be needed to move on land. “He did something very different. This fish was not [out of the water.] We think this was the evolution of a land-dwelling fish,” he said. Looking at animals today, Stewart said it’s “not that crazy” to think of a fish going from water to land or back and forth over time. Neil Shubin, professor of organic biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, is on Ellesmere Island, where he discovered the Qikiqtania and Tiktaalik fossils days apart in 2004. (Edward Daeschler) Some frogs also live entirely in water, while others live mostly on land, he said. But to see a similar dynamic take place 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 picked up the fossil, which was lying 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 on them, so they knew there was a fossil. In 2004, the fossil was piled up and shipped south, along with hundreds of others, for painstaking study. Finally two years ago, Stewart and his team brought the fossil to Shubin’s lab for a CT scan. “We were able to look inside the fossil and see a lot of preserved parts of the animal that we didn’t know were there,” Stewart said, adding that it was new but “also something very unusual.” This image shows the preserved jaws and scales from the fossil Qikiqtania. (Tom Stewart) Fossils of an ancient fish species Tiktaalik roseae were also found during this 2004 trip to Ellesmere. Tiktaalik is one of the best-known ancient transitional species between fish and land-dwelling tetrapods, or animals with two pairs of limbs. Both Qikiqtania and Tiktalik will remain in the Canadian Museum of Nature’s Nunavut Fossil Collection in Ottawa until the museum’s facilities can welcome them home. Research on Qikiqtani was made possible thanks to people in Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord, 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.”