The fossilized brain of a 500 - million - yr - old worm has been discovered by research worker , open up new insights into how learning ability evolve and patch up up holes in thefossil recordsof ancient scalidophorans .
The halo - shape structure , which the investigator interpret as the louse brain , mark the first fossilise nervous organization of such a puppet , made potential by a wholesale analysis of fossilizedMarkuelia hunanensisembryos at relatively former stage of development . What makes these specimens so exceptional is their three - dimensional fossilisation , which is particularly rare for delicate nervous systems and allows incredible depth psychology of structure never seen before by science .
Markuelia hunanensiswas a dirt ball - like nautical beast know only from embryonic stage of development . It exist during the Cambrian Period , in which plant life began to emerge on Earth and multicellular , mineralized organisms became remarkably more coarse . You may have heard of some of their closest living relatives , include the “ penis worm ” , which is name for obvious reasons .
Surface images of the embryo specimens. Image Credit: Dong et el., 2022
Found in the Hunan Province , South China , the specimen amaze the international team of scientist .
" Prior to maybe five or six years ago it was but non - existing . Usually it ’s all in the form of wholly flatten fogy , ” Phillip Donoghue , study author and Professor at the University of Bristol , toldNewsweek .
" It ’s preserved in a fundamentally dissimilar room . essentially , as the dodo start to decay , the microbes that are consuming it actually lithify themselves and turn the thing into John Rock . So , it turn into a firearm of rock before the sediment [ turn into stone ] , and that protects it from being collapsed into two dimension . "
The worm learning ability is of special importance due to its similarities with nematode – a unmistakably important scientific theoretical account organism – but it also chip in to our understanding of how mastermind developed throughout evolution in arthropod .
The pristine fogy offers hope that samples preserve from this period could hold many more secret than primitively thought , offer soft tissues in three dimensions in ways most fossil do not .
The research was published in the journalRoyal Society Open Science .
