“Other coelacanths lived in more shallow, estuarylike environments 400 million years ago, and you can envisage them using the fins more like walking legs.” 
 
 The Amemiya team reports evidence that the coelacanth’s genes have been evolving more slowly than those of mammals, possibly because of “a static habitat and lack of predators.” But its environment must have changed quite considerably over the last 400 million years, Dr. Meyer said. Previous studies of genes that were lost in this transition could only compare teleost fish to tetrapods, meaning that differences in gene content could have been due to loss in the tetrapod or in the lobe-finned fish lineages. Although Latimeria does not possess a placenta, it gives birth to live young and has very large, vascularised eggs, but the relationship between Hoxa14, the HA14E1 enhancer and blood island formation in the coelacanth remains unknown.
– The coelacanth doesn't just look like a prehistoric fish, it was believed to be one, extinct for some 70 million years—until one turned up at a South African fish market in 1938. Now, scientists have decoded the endangered species' genome, and they say they've found some clues as to how today's land animals evolved from a fish ancestor, reports the New York Times. First, some fascinating backstory: The Times explains that the coelacanth and lung fish—both "lobe-finned fish"—have been duking it out for the title of the closet relative to that first ancestral fish that used its fins to walk on land. Post-decoding, the lungfish emerges as the closer relative, but in the Times' telling, the "coelacanth may have the last laugh"—that's because the lungfish genome is too long to decode using current technology. What scientists learned from the coelacanths' DNA: Even though coelacanths don't have a placenta, they have a gene related to one that allows land animals to grow a placenta. A DNA sequence found in coelacanths, but not ordinary fish, bolsters the genes that helps an embryo grow limbs. Researchers actually injected the coelacanth's sequence into mice; "it lit up right away and made an almost normal limb," says one. You can check out the original article at Nature.