In an Evolutionary Transition from Sea to Land, the Real Challenge May Be "Drying Out"

Researchers at the University of New South Wales have published in the journal Evolution, documenting something we kind of already knew: some fish can spend considerable time out of water, not only surviving but thriving ("Repeated evolution of amphibious behavior in fish and its implications for the colonisation of novel environments").

The interest is supposed to lie in demonstrating the ease with which sea dwellers could have made the evolutionary transition to land, with the burden of b...