A Swedish study of 370-million-year-old fossil fish has shown that ears probably first developed as respiratory organs, one of the researchers on the project said.
The fossils "show how the ear developed in detail as a complex process of steps ... and that the (first development) had to do with breathing," Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University, north of Stockholm, told AFP.
Intrigued by how ears in the first land crawlers developed, Ahlberg and colleague Martin Brazeau have studied ear-like features in fossils of pre-historic fish called Panderichthys...
via Yahoo News