BMC Ecology BioMed Central Research article Open Access Visual ecology of the Australian lungfish (Neoceratodus forsteri) Nathan S Hart*1, Helena J Bailes1,2, Misha Vorobyev1,3, N Justin Marshall1 and Shaun P Collin1 Address: 1School of Biomedical Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia, 2Faculty of Life Sciences, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK and 3Department of Optometry and Vision Science, The University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand Email: Nathan S Hart* -
[email protected]; Helena J Bailes -
[email protected]; Misha Vorobyev -
[email protected]; N Justin Marshall -
[email protected]; Shaun P Collin -
[email protected] * Corresponding author Published: 18 December 2008 Received: 27 August 2008 Accepted: 18 December 2008 BMC Ecology 2008, 8:21 doi:10.1186/1472-6785-8-21 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6785/8/21 © 2008 Hart et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: The transition from water to land was a key event in the evolution of vertebrates that occurred over a period of 15–20 million years towards the end of the Devonian. Tetrapods, including all land-living vertebrates, are thought to have evolved from lobe-finned (sarcopterygian) fish that developed adaptations for an amphibious existence.