dog breeds with webbed feet

toes are just so weird, i mean have you everlooked at them, they’re so stubby and useless, why can’t we have cool grippy toes likechimpanzees? hey guys julia here for dnews. this littlepiggie went to market and this little piggie is...well, it makes no sense. it looks likenothing else in the animal kingdom. seriously. have you ever just looked at your toes andthought why? well, hallo pjotter asked us how our toes evolved. and that’s a goodquestion. toes likely evolved from the same bones thatbecame fins, wings, or hooves in other species. the dominating scientific theories are thatfingers and toes are exclusive features of tetrapods, or vertebrates with limbs. butaccording to one study, toes may have evolved

even before fish left the ocean. the study,published in the journal nature, found 385 million years ago, a fish named panderichthys,had homologous bones to our fingers and toes. either way, phalanges are over hundreds ofmillions of years old. human toes, specifically, are a little newerto the scene. of all the other living primates, we’re the only ones that exclusively walkupright on two legs. other primates, like chimps, have little grippy feet and ours arejust kind of weird looking in comparison, but research shows they used to be grippyback in the day. according to a study published in the journal foot and ankle international,our ancestors australopithecus afarensis, which lived 3.5 million ago years ago, hadfeet that looked remarkably like a chimpanzee’s!

fast-forward to homo habilis an ancestor wholived 1.76 million years ago. and her feet looked a lot like ours do now. we traded inour opposable toe for shorter toes overall, and gained an arch in our foot. what happenedin that interim? well in short, our ancestors came down from the trees and started walkingon land. as our foot evolved to support walking on the ground, we started moving faster andfaster, eventually learning to run. these changes forced our feet to evolve to dealwith both balance and propulsion in a highly efficient way. basically, our feet becamemore springy and shock-absorbent. and there's a study to back this up in thejournal of experimental biology, showing basically, these toes are made for running. the researcherscreated models which showed that longer-toed

individuals do more mechanical work to stabilizetheir joints and ligaments. this means they use more energy to run the same distance asshorter-toed people. this supports what’s called the “endurancerunning hypothesis” or the idea that our ancestors were really good at running longdistances in order to chase down and wear out prey. in this kind of hunting style, thosewith long toes are evolutionarily selected against because it takes them more work todo run down the same prey. the researchers also found shorter toes might reduce the riskof injury meaning, long-toed people would expend more energy to run the same distance,and run a higher risk of injury while doing it!

so, our toes, while short and stubby, maybehave evolved to help us run, keep our balance, and absorb impact. so, the next time you gofor a jog thank your toes, even though they can’t help you climb trees anymore. the weird thing though i keep hearing abouttoes, is that our pinky toe is going away, that we’re evolving out of it. it’s justa useless vestigial structure. but that’s more old wives tale than anything else. asfor one of our other useless lumps left over from evolution: the appendix, it might notbe so useless after all, tara has the whole story, right here.