Originally published: Jun 26 2014 - 1:30pm, Inside Science News Service By: Ker Than, Contributor ( Inside Science ) -- Terrestrial animals may owe a special debt to the sun and the moon. It may have been their combined pull on ancient Earth's oceans that helped primitive air-breathing fish gain a toehold on land, new research suggests. In a new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A , physicist Steven Balbus argues that the gravitational forces generated by the sun and moon would have been conducive to the formation of a vast network of isolated tidal pools during the Devonian Period, between 420 to 360 million years ago, when fish-like vertebrates first clambered out of the sea. Image credit: supersum via flickr | http://bit.ly/1rDLJFJ Rights information: http://bit.ly/c34Awz “By the end of the Devonian, there were vertebrates that were quite at home moving around on land,” said Balbus, who is at the University of Oxford in the Unite
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