"The oldest example of the brain" Contrary to expectations!

A newly discovered brain in a 525-million-year-old arthropod fossil appears to be the oldest ever found and could end the ongoing debate about how brains first evolved in invertebrates.

And it was found in a family of small, armored lobes known as the Cardiodictyon catenulum. Surprisingly, the brain survived and consisted of three different components of the nervous system.

This is significant because it indicates that the brain developed separately from the head and nervous system.

It was previously thought that the brains of these creatures were divided into repetitive pieces of neural structures called ganglia, just like the nervous system in the torso.

“This anatomy was completely unexpected because the heads and brains of modern arthropods and some of their fossil ancestors have been considered fragmentary for more than a century,” says neuroscientist Nicholas Strausfeld of the University of Arizona.

The fossil was discovered in the southern province of Yunnan in China in the late 1980s.

Because the fossil is only 1.5 cm (0.6 in) in diameter, the team was unable to take an x-ray of it. Instead, they used a technique called chromatic filtering, in which a series of high-resolution digital images are used to filter light of different wavelengths and display internal structure.

Then the shape of the naked head and brain was compared with the shape of other fossil modern arthropods and the nature of their gene expression. The comparison shows that the same pattern of brain organization has been preserved for half a billion years.

“We have determined the common imprint of all brains and how they formed,” says evolutionary neuroscientist Frank Hirt of King’s College London. “We realized that each region of the brain and its corresponding functions are determined by the same set of genes, regardless depending on which species we were looking at.” “This determines the overall genetic blueprint for the creation of the brain.”

Arthropods are the richest group in the animal kingdom, including a range of insects, crustaceans, spiders, centipedes, and centipedes. And after lobotomy appeared in the arthropod, which in Greek means “true arthropod foot,” the main difference was where evolution went.

Descendants of these creatures live today in velvet worms native to Australia, New Zealand and South America, but the researchers believe their approach could be applied to a variety of species other than arthropods.

It will also be interesting to compare the new data with what we know about the development of the brain and spinal cord in vertebrates. Finally, the researchers say their study sheds light on how nature survives during times of massive change and what we stand to lose if we don’t get the climate crisis under control.

The study was published in the journal The science.

Source: Science Alert

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