"My work explores fundamental questions about who we are and where we came from," says Professor Meemann Chang, who in a long career examining fish fossils has discovered some of our earliest ancestors.

"To be able to figure out what a new fossil is, how it is related to other organisms, how it lived, and what it can tell us about the ancient environment" is truly enlightening, she says.

On Thursday evening, Chang was honored with a L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science award for the insights she has had, one of which was showing that lungfish were not, as previously thought, the evolutionary link between marine life and mammals－including humans－and that the distinction belonged to the sarcopterygian lobe-finned fish, a marine life form dating back 400 million years.

"On this occasion it is impossible for me not to reflect on my career in vertebrate paleontology,' Chang said at the awards ceremony held at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. "I started to study paleontology some 60 years ago when I was a student at Moscow State University."

But the choice of career was not her own, "at that time it was arranged much like an arranged marriage".