Origins of sex discovered

In one of the biggest discoveries in the evolutionary history of sexual reproduction, Professor Long has found that internal fertilisation and copulation appeared in ancient armoured fishes, called placoderms, about 385 million years ago in what is now Scotland. Placoderms, the most primitive jawed vertebrates, are the earliest vertebrate ancestors of humans. Published in Nature,  the discovery shows that male fossils of the Microbrachius dicki, which belong to the antiarch group of placoderms, developed bony L-shaped genital limbs called claspers to transfer sperm to females; and females developed small paired bones to lock the male organs in place for mating.