But when the production company now called Tangled Bank Studios came calling in 2011, Shubin was persuaded that executives there wanted to 'elevate the conversation … but also make it entertaining,' as he did. Shubin didn't write the book with a film treatment in mind. Along the way, the book introduces a throng of scientists whose work contributed to the book's central thesis: that our own anatomy bears the traces of animal ancestors that lived eons ago. The book chronicles Shubin's own evolution, from naive graduate student who couldn't spot a fossil even when he was staring right at it to skilled paleontologist whose fossil expeditions have uncovered groundbreaking new specimens. That philosophy also pervaded Shubin's 2008 best-selling book, Your Inner Fish, which makes a point of telling readers not only what scientists know but also how they know it - and how they learn to know anything at all. 'I want (viewers) to see the joy of discovery in science.' I went into science to discover, to go into the unknown,' Shubin says. 'I didn't go into science to memorize note cards. And, in a tougher sell, the show's creators want viewers to be enraptured not just by scientific results but also by the halting, messy, failure-ridden scientific process itself. They want viewers to realize that their own bodies are directly related to those of fish and reptiles that lived millions of years ago. The tritheledont's appearance is a moment of wonder, but Shubin and his collaborators have greater ambitions than making a more factual Jurassic Park. But 21st-century computer animation has resurrected the little animal in all its lithe, long-tailed glory for a star turn in Shubin's series, premiering April 9.

No flesh-and-blood tritheledont has scuttled the Earth for at least 150 million years. In an episode of Shubin's new PBS series, Your Inner Fish, based on his best-selling book of the same name, he cups a tiny Jurassic reptile called a tritheledont in his palm before it jumps off his hand and meanders across a tabletop. Now television is bringing those fossils to life. Paleobiologist Neil Shubin digs up the fossils of extinct animals.

Evolution your inner fish