Your Inner Fish

Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish is the unexpected story of how one creature's journey out of the water made the human body what it is today - and one man's voyage of discovery in search of our origins.

Have you ever wondered why our bodies look and work and fail the way they do?

One of the world's leading experts in evolutionary history, Neil Shubin reveals the secrets of our biology: why if we want to understand our limbs we should take a close look at Tiktaalik, the first fish capable of doing a push-up; why if we want to know why we hiccup, the answer is in the way fish breathe; and why it is that fish teeth are surprisingly similar to human breasts.

'This would be Darwin's book of the year'

  Sunday Telegraph

'An intelligent, exhilarating, and compelling scientific adventure story'

  Oliver Sacks, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

'Delightful ... his enthusiasm is infectious'

  Steven D. Levitt, author of Freakonomics

'Profoundly fascinating ... a magisterial work ... expressed so clearly and with such good humour'

  Financial Times

'Will make you think about your organs in ways you have never considered before'

  Sunday Times

Neil Shubin is a palaeontologist in the great tradition of his mentors, Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould. He has discovered fossils around the world that have changed the way we think about many of the key transitions in evolution and has pioneered a new synthesis of expeditionary palaeontology, developmental genetics and genomics. He trained at Columbia, Harvard and Berkeley and is currently Chairman of the Department of Anatomy at the University of Chicago.