Crawling through Time: Fish bones reveal past climate change
By Carrie Lock
The snakehead fish, best known lately as a threat to U.S. waters, may finally be doing some good. A German scientist asserts that fossils of relatives of the much-feared invader can shed light on major climatic changes of the distant past.
The air-breathing freshwater fish can crawl on its strong pectoral fins over land between lakes and rivers, taking over ecosystems that it moves into. The snakeheads now invading the United States aren’t typical. Most of the world’s 29 snakehead species in the family Channidae thrive only in warm, wet conditions.