fossil with intact brain and intestine

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Scientists with the brain and intestines are still intact, discovered a wonderful fossil larva.
The fossilized creature is one of the earliest ancestors of the group, known as arthropods, which include insects, crabs and lobsters.
A unique window to the past, an ancient critic allowed experts to better understand the evolutionary relationship between arthropods of the past and today’s arthropods.

We know what fossils look like. For example, typical dinosaur fossils are bones, rotated into a stone and preserve from time to time, if we are particularly lucky, in large collections that can be reinforced to depict the beast they used for the whole.

Now, not all fossils are as follows. Some are only the impressions of small beings or animals left in the rocks, but most of them have something in common – they just remain hard. Except for those found in the environment, especially when preserved, soft fabrics break over time and everything we are left with is the stone bone.

But not always. Sometimes we were lucky-for example, the team did when it found 520 million years of earthworm larvae fossil that still had its own brain and hoses untouched;

“It is always interesting to see what is in the example, using a 3D image,” Katherine Dobson said in a press release, one of the study in the center of this great find, “but in this incredible small larvae, natural phosilization has reached almost perfect preservation.”

This “almost perfect preservation” made an example of an absolute gold mine for evolutionary biologists.

According to a press release, the structures observed in the creature, which were investigated through 3D images generated from scannings performed using technique known as synchrotron X -ray, include the brain, “digestive glands, primitive circulation system and even nerve traces. In the past, we were dramatically underestimated by the complexity of early arthropods – a group that emerged through Cambria explosions and includes creatures such as crabs, lobsters, insects and millipeds.

This detail also allowed scientists to establish evolutionary relationships between the critics of the ancient past and those who turn around today. For example, canned larvae was a brain region known as “protocerebrum”. Now that scientists have seen this, they see that it has evolved into the NUVIMOSO heads of arthropods, which allowed them to flourish in such a variety of environment, from the depths of the ocean to the continent (yes, including Antarctica).

“When I was dreaming of one fossil that I would most like to know most,” Martin Smith, the main researcher, said in a press release when I saw wonderful constructions, preserved under his skin, my jaw just fell – how could these complex properties prevent decay and still be here to see half a billion years? ”

Currently, scientists are happy to count that the creature has been preserved in total, giving us a unique window to what life seemed in our distant past.

Photo credit: Hearst manages

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