Reconstruction of a pair of Stanleycaris hirpex; upper individual has transparency of the exterior increased to show internal organs. Nervous system is shown in light beige, digestive system in dark red. Credit: Sabrina Cappelli, © Royal Ontario Museum
Phys.org has a story about fossilized brains...500 million year old brains. A recent paper from researchers at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada describes the fossilized brain in a species of Radiodont called Stanleycaris. The animal is related to Anomalocaris and distantly related to modern day spiders and insects. This amazing fossil was collected sometime in the 1980's and 1990's in a deposit of the Burgess Shale above the original Wolcott Quarry in British Columbia, Canada.
Royal Ontario Museum revealed new research based on a cache of fossils that contains the brain and nervous system of a half-billion-year-old marine predator from the Burgess Shale called Stanleycaris. Stanleycaris belonged to an ancient, extinct offshoot of the arthropod evolutionary tree called Radiodonta, distantly related to modern insects and spiders. These findings shed light on the evolution of the arthropod brain, vision, and head structure. The results were announced in the paper, "A three-eyed radiodont with fossilized neuroanatomy informs the origin of the arthropod head and segmentation," published in the journal Current Biology.
It's what's inside Stanleycaris' head that has the researchers most excited. In 84 of the fossils, the remains of the brain and nerves are still preserved after 506 million years.
"While fossilized brains from the Cambrian Period aren't new, this discovery stands out for the astonishing quality of preservation and the large number of specimens," said Joseph Moysiuk, lead author of the research and a University of Toronto (U of T) Ph.D. Candidate in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, based at the Royal Ontario Museum. "We can even make out fine details such as visual processing centers serving the large eyes and traces of nerves entering the appendages. The details are so clear it's as if we were looking at an animal that died yesterday."
