Walking fish is harder than walking dogs, but it still beats walking sticks...
From the NYT Science section:
Fossil Called Missing Link From Sea to Land Animals
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Scientists found evidence of limbs in the making in the 375-million-year-old fish's forward fins.
The funny thing is that in an interview I listened to on NPR yesterday, one of the scientists mentioned that he hated hearing finds such as this described as "the missing link", because it is merely one missing piece in a long chain of missing pieces, and furthermore, it does not actually represent an ancestral state within a linear progression towards tetrapody and eventually humanity. It is unquestionably a branch that shares ancestors with the line that would lead to amphibians, but its large size, developed neck, and the migration of eyeballs to the top of its head imply that the process towards terrestrialization had already been underway for some evolutionary time.
The other funny bits come later in the article when discussing the relevance of 'transitional forms' to Creation-"Science". There is an argument lifted reducto ad absurdum about how finding this fossil only proves the need to find intermediaries between this 'half-way point' and the next... or to point out that even if amphibians are descended from fish, you still can't demonstrate that fish are descendants of invertebrates, but I suppose that they haven't heard of Pikia...
Last but not least, the idea of giant killer salamanders always brings a smile to my face.
Then I think about the vicious and voracious tiger salamanders I had as a kid, and suddenly I am maybe not smiling so much anymore...