An ancient radiodont predator with three eyes reveals key information about the evolution of the arthropod body plan. 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 has been
An ancient radiodont predator with three eyes reveals key information about the evolution of the arthropod body plan.
“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 PhD 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.
In present-day arthropods like insects, the brain consists of protocerebrum, deutocerebrum, and tritocerebrum. While the difference in a segment may not sound game-changing, it in fact has radical scientific implications. Since repeated copies of many arthropod organs can be found in their segmented bodies, figuring out how segments line up between different species is key to understanding how these structures diversified across the group.
Paper summary, showing the interpretation of the nervous system from fossils of Stanleycaris and implications for understanding the evolution of the arthropod brain. The brain is represented in red and the nerve cords in purple. Credit: Photo by Jean-Bernard Caron © Royal Ontario Museum
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