Fossilized brains of ancient sea creatures found in northern Greenland
March 19, 2018 by Bob Yirka, Phys.org report
A team of researchers from Korea, the U.K. and Denmark has found fossilized brains of sea creatures that lived during the Cambrian explosion. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes features of the brains and why they believe their findings may overturn a commonly held belief about the ancestry of panarthropods and invertebrate panarthropods and also vertebrates.
The fossils are from Kerygmachela kierkegaardi, a type of sea creature that lived from approximately 521 to 514 million years ago. The creatures were approximately 25 centimeters in length, had large eyes and had 11 feather-shaped swimming flaps on their sides. They also had a long, thin tail, long twin appendages on their round heads, which they apparently used for grasping prey, and, as this new evidence shows, a single-segment brain. It is the brain that is newsworthy in this new effort—prior fossilized samples of Kerygmachela have been found before, but this is the first time that fossilized brains have been uncovered. The fossilized brains, the team notes, are made of thin carbon films.
Read more at:
https://phys.org/news/2018-03-fossilized-brains-ancient-sea-creatures.html#jCp
