The Crown Prince In Hiding

”Number two is rather special. It is a specimen of something that still lives alongside us.”

The coelacanth is one of those living creatures whose appearance four hundred million years ago is identical to what it looks like today.

It is a living, breathing trace of the past.

It carries within it the record of the greatest evolutionary transition in the history of the world. Its significance lies not in its thick scales or its existence only in the deep sea, but in what it represents — the group known as lobe-finned fish.

Lobe-finned fish have a structure entirely unlike that of ordinary fish.

While most fish have fins made of nothing more than thin, flexible rays of cartilage — designed simply to stabilize themselves in water — the fins of the coelacanth are fleshy lobes, dense with muscle, and most critically of all, they contain a complex internal skeleton hidden within.

The bones arranged in segments beneath those fleshy fins share the same structure, without any deviation, as the bones that form the limbs of four-legged animals — and of humans.

It is the blueprint that every land animal carries.

The lobe-finned fish is therefore the most important evolutionary evidence pointing to where we came from.

It is biological proof that before our ancestors struggled and clawed their way up onto dry land, the concept of ”legs” did not need to be invented. On the contrary — legs had already existed, long before we ever set foot on land, hundreds of millions of years earlier in the water.

They simply needed a little more engineering from evolution to be made usable on dry ground.

”This creature still swims in the water today. And yet it is not the direct answer — only an indirect one.”

We did not descend from the coelacanth.

We descended from something that was a relative of the coelacanth, and both that something and the coelacanth shared a common ancestor.

For humanity, this was like searching for our great-great-grandparents while only knowing what the cousins on our mother’s side looked like.

”So does that mean all of us are fish?”

”We are all fish that learned to walk on land.”

”...And they evolved lungs along the way? Is that how it worked?”

”Lungs were not the hardest part. Evolution had a far more brutal problem to solve than that.”

Dan turned away from Specimen Number Two, cradling it carefully as he listened to the Professor with full attention.

”We have already succeeded in living on land. But if you look back into the past, you will see the true genius of evolution — how it solved the most difficult problem any living creature has ever faced in the history of adaptation.”

It was a problem that took more than a hundred million years to solve. Hundreds of separate biological challenges, each resolved one by one — ten thousand years per problem, or perhaps a hundred thousand, or in some cases, ten million.

The sacrifice involved was beyond counting, and beyond anything the descendants living today could ever fully comprehend.

The underwater world and the world above ground are two entirely different worlds.

Those who made the crossing faced gravity in its full and relentless weight — something utterly unlike life in water, where movement was free and effortless, like a bird in flight.

Looking back at it now, from the vantage of success, one might think it was no great matter.

But if one tried to imagine being one of them, in an age when no living creature had ever set foot on dry land —

conquering it would have seemed almost impossible.

UV radiation. Solar rays. Temperature that was mercilessly, brutally high.

The land above was completely dry, and yet life can only exist when it is wet.

We are made with water. Water is what we are.

And so the central challenge of this game was this: how do you carry water with you onto land?

Once that core question was established, what remained were the puzzles evolution had to solve simultaneously, all at once.

Many lives. Many solutions. Some groups relied on their own moist skin — venturing briefly onto land before retreating back to rewet themselves.

But other groups took a path that demanded far greater sacrifice. The bony fins thickened — growing heavier across generation after generation — to bear up against the cruelty of gravity.

And there was one more organ that ranked among the hardest problems of all.

The eye.

Fish cannot see on land, just as we cannot see clearly underwater. The way light refracts through air and through water is vastly, fundamentally different.

”That’s true... I hadn’t thought of that at all.”

Every pair of eyes had been built to accommodate the refraction of light through water as its medium — and had been that way for millions upon millions of years.

Evolution had to re-engineer the eye entirely. But rather than wasting time changing the proteins inside the lens, or building some kind of protective coating, evolution chose instead to change the shape of the eyeball itself — rounding it into a sphere to counteract the refraction of light and restore the same clarity that had existed underwater.

Evolution also reinvented the autofocus system. It moved away from the fish model — sliding the lens forward and backward — and replaced it with the contraction and dilation of the lens through newly developed iris muscles.

And because air is what dries everything, always —

a system to replenish moisture to the eye was created to keep it wet against the dry world outside.

Eyelids.

Tear glands.

Each with its own intricate, independent circulatory system.

”Back to the largest problem of all.”

On land, everything is dry. And water — which the dryness pulls out of the body molecule by molecule — had to be retained at all costs.

To solve this, evolution needed to find a way for these creatures to lose as little water as possible. Or, put another way —

how do you make a living body hold water inside itself?

”They needed to become something like a water balloon.”

Professor Pi’erre’s analogy made the image immediately clear for the Prince.

”That does make sense.”

So what, then, would meet the specifications of a water balloon?

It had to be flexible. It had to be strong. It had to be light. And most critically of all — it had to prevent water from evaporating out.

”After millions of years of trial — evolution’s genius found the answer.”

Keratin.

It seals moisture inside, preventing it from evaporating into drier air.

On land, there is no water to filter the sun’s rays. So keratin in the outer layers of skin serves as a shield against ultraviolet radiation, protecting tissue from damage.

Skin reinforced with keratin becomes tough and resilient, allowing animals to move across ground, stone, and thorned brush without sustaining serious injury.

Evolution did not create keratin. It created a system that used keratin.

Because keratin had already existed within them from the beginning — but it had nothing to do with preventing water loss. It had been used primarily as internal cell structure. Land animals took that same keratin and developed it further, until it became external armor.

Every creature on land — including us — carries that same keratin, functioning as a suit of armor against evaporation.

Amphibians have it too, but not in sufficient quantity to halt gas exchange through the skin — though it is enough to keep water in.

And keratin, in the hundreds of millions of years that followed, would be extended into weapons — hard shells, claws, fangs, hair. All of it, made from keratin.

”So it didn’t just solve the problem of survival... evolution took the same material and turned it into weapons for land animals as well?”

”This is the genius of the divine.”

And of course, Prince Fury himself —

the shell that had been spoken of throughout all this —

the layers that had grown and built upon one another into hardened armor...

He had it too.

”As for the lungs...”

The truth of it was this.

Lungs had been evolved four hundred and twenty million years ago, within the lineage of bony fish.

That was an era when not a single creature had yet thought to conquer land.

Which meant — the lungs we use today did not originate with the need to breathe above the surface. That was never the reason they came to exist.

In the ocean, oxygen must first dissolve into water before it can enter the circulatory system.

But on land, oxygen is already present in the air.

Would it not be more efficient to allow oxygen to pass directly into the bloodstream?

The truth is that if air is pumped into moist tissue dense with blood vessels, gas exchange occurs naturally — it always did.

And the ancestors of land animals had already been performing that exchange, by gulping air into their bodies — allowing it to make contact with the moist tissue of the mouth, or sometimes the digestive tract, the intestine.

The mudskipper is the animal that does exactly this.

It is the oldest method of breathing on land during those early transitional ages, and it survives to the present day.

Shortly after, the method proved effective, and from it, lungs developed in relatively little time.

”So lungs came later...”

”The last to matter.”

They had already existed in fish for a long time.

And today, in fish, they are called —

the swim bladder.

What the Prince had encountered that day left his mind swept clean.

And he might find himself unable to sleep that night upon learning the truth — that we never truly escaped the ocean. We never left it behind.

We simply carried it with us when we came ashore.

A hand rested on the hardened remains of Specimen Number Two. Dan’s eyes stayed on it as his fingers traced slowly along the scales.

”Our relatives who never came up from the water — they have been locked in this form for more than four hundred million years... while you and I, the rest of us, we...”

He could not finish.

This was the power of evolution.

The force that compels living things to do whatever it takes to survive in their environment, no matter how harsh the world becomes.

”Professor.”

At that moment, the building’s security guard descended into the specimen storage, carrying something — a rigid card of some kind — which he brought to Professor Pi’erre.

The Professor then carried it over and handed it to Dan.

”Dan... this belongs to you.”

A stiff red card. His name on it. The seal of the World Paleontological Organization.

”Keep it safe. You are now the project’s owner, succeeding Mr. Francis.”

Everyone else’s cards were white. Only the owner, co-owner, or primary sponsor carried a red card.

And as sponsor — full access to everything within this paleontological organization was his.

”Understood, Professor.”

”Then please follow me to the meeting room, Mr. Dan.”

Thomasin led the way.