Over half a billion years ago, early arthropods like Fuxianhuia could be found inhabiting shallow seas near what is now the Yunnan Province in China. These waters receded long ago, but the mineral deposits they left behind have acted like a time capsule, preserving the remains ofFuxianhuia and other Cambrian-era creatures for hundreds of millions of years.
While Fuxianhuia remains have been discovered before, none have retained detailed traces of the creatures' delicate neuroanatomy. But in today's issue ofNature, an international team of researchers report on the fossilized body of a three-inch long Fuxianhuia specimen that possesses such traces, and find its brain to be remarkably advanced.
"There have been all sorts of implications why branchiopods shouldn't be the ancestors of insects," explains Strausfeld. "Many of us thought the proof in the pudding would be a fossil that would show a malacostracan-like brain in a creature that lived long before the origin of the branchiopods; and bingo! — this is what this is."
The researchers' findings are published in the latest issue of Nature.