Who he is
A scientist who went looking for a fish nobody had ever seen. He and his team bet that an animal between fish and four-legged animals should sit in river rock about 375 million years old, lying bare at the surface. They found rock like that on a map in a geology textbook: Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian Arctic.
The dig
Every summer meant weeks of splitting rock on bare, windy ground. By the fourth trip, the money was nearly gone. Then, in July 2004, the team found Tiktaalik.