Fossils of fish species that lived more than 405 million years ago in southern China may shed light on the origin of modern human beings.

Secrets of the ancient creature's skull were unveiled today by Chinese scientists in the latest issue of Nature magazine in London.

Zhu Min and his team of researchers at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropoly, Chinese Academy of Sciences, found the fossils of the ancient fish twice in 2001 and in 2002 in Qujing of Southwest China's Yunnan Province.

In the following three years, Zhu and his colleagues discovered that the creature was one of the most ancient species of fish, the only kind found with aspects of two different types of ancient fish.

One, the ray-finned bony fish, includes the majority of modern fish species; while the other, the lobe-finned bony fish, allegedly "crawled" out of the water millions of years ago to evolve into today's reptiles and human beings.

The link between the two has been missing, casting doubt on the evolution of ancient fish, according to Zhu.

Zhu and his fellow researchers gave the ancient fish species a Chinese name "Chenxiao Miman Fish," which means literally "Fish of the Dawn."

"The name shows our respect for our teacher Zhang Miman, an academic at the Chinese Academy of Sciences."

The discovery of the species is an exciting step forward for researchers on the evolution of ancient fish, Zhu said.

The ancient species has a skull roof much like that of actinopterygians, the group that includes most modern species of fish.

But the fine features of its anatomy may shed light on the evolutionary origin of "cosmine" a hard surface tissue found in many fossil sarcopterygians, the fish that later evolved into land vertebrates.

(China Daily 05/04/2006 page1)