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525-Million-Year-Old Fossil Defies Textbook Explanation for Brain Evolution - Neuroscience News

525-Million-Year-Old Fossil Defies Textbook Explanation for Brain Evolution - Neuroscience News

525-Million-Year-Old Fossil Defies Textbook Explanation for Brain Evolution - Neuroscience News
Nov 27, 2022 2 mins, 18 secs

Neuroscience is the scientific study of nervous systems.

Neuroscience can involve research from many branches of science including those involving neurology, brain science, neurobiology, psychology, computer science, artificial intelligence, statistics, prosthetics, neuroimaging, engineering, medicine, physics, mathematics, pharmacology, electrophysiology, biology, robotics and technology.

– Definition of neurology: a science involved in the study of the nervous systems, especially of the diseases and disorders affecting them.

– Neurology research can include information involving brain research, neurological disorders, medicine, brain cancer, peripheral nervous systems, central nervous systems, nerve damage, brain tumors, seizures, neurosurgery, electrophysiology, BMI, brain injuries, paralysis and spinal cord treatments.

Summary: The fossil of a 525-million-year-old tiny sea creature with a preserved nervous system may solve a century-long debate about how the brains of arthropods evolved.

Measuring barely half an inch (less than 1.5 centimeters) long and initially discovered in 1984, the fossil had hidden a crucial secret until now: a delicately preserved nervous system, including a brain.

“To our knowledge, this is the oldest fossilized brain we know of, so far,” Strausfeld said.

This contrasts starkly with its head and brain, both of which lack any evidence of segmentation.

“This anatomy was completely unexpected because the heads and brains of modern arthropods, and some of their fossilized ancestors, have for over a hundred years been considered as segmented,” Strausfeld said.

“But Cardiodictyon shows that the early head wasn’t segmented, nor was its brain, which suggests the brain and the trunk nervous system likely evolved separately,” Strausfeld said.

Cardiodictyon was part of the Chengjiang fauna, a famous deposit of fossils in the Yunnan Province discovered by paleontologist Xianguang Hou. The soft, delicate bodies of lobopodians have preserved well in the fossil record, but other than Cardiodictyon none have been scrutinized for their head and brain, possibly because lobopodians are generally small.

“That tells us that armored lobopodians might have been the earliest arthropods,” Strausfeld said, predating even trilobites, an iconic and diverse group of marine arthropods that went extinct around 250 million years ago.

However, work over the last 10 years, much of it done by Strausfeld, has identified several cases of preserved brains in a variety of fossilized arthropods.

In their new study, the authors not only identified the brain of Cardiodictyon but also compared it with those of known fossils and of living arthropods, including spiders and centipedes.

This has important implications when comparing the nervous system of arthropods with those of vertebrates, which show a similar distinct architecture in which the forebrain and midbrain are genetically and developmentally distinct from the spinal cord, they said.

Here, clarification is provided by the fossilized nervous system of the lower Cambrian lobopodian Cardiodictyon catenulum, which reveals an unsegmented head and brain comprising three cephalic domains, distinct from the metameric ventral nervous system serving its appendicular trunk

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