This May Be The Oldest Example of a Brain, And It's Not What We Expected

An ongoing debate about how brains first evolved in arthropods may have been settled with the discovery of a 525-million-year-old brain.

The brain was made up of three parts distinct from the nervous system, and it was spotted in a tiny armored lobopodian called Cardiodictyon catenulum.

It shows that the brain is separate from the head and the nervous system.

Previously, it was thought that the brains of these creatures were similar to the nervous system in the trunk.

Nicholas Strausfeld from the University of Arizona says that the heads and brains of modern arthropods have been considered to be divided for over a century.

The fossil was found in China in the 1980's. The C. catenulum would have used multiple pairs of legs to scuttle around the sea floor.

The team couldn't X-ray the fossil because it was so small. They used a method called chromatic filters, where a succession of high-resolution digitalized images are used to filter out light of different wavelength and map the internal structure.

The brain and head were compared to other fossils and their genes. According to the comparisons, the same brain organization plan has been in place for half a billion years.

Frank Hirth is an evolutionary neuroscientist from King's College London.

Each brain domain and its corresponding features are specified by the same combination of genes. A common genetic ground plan is identified.

Among arthropods, insects, crustaceans, spiders, and centipedes are the most species rich. The key difference as evolution took its course was the emergence of the Euarthropods.

The descendants of these creatures are found in Australia, New Zealand, and South America, but the researchers think that their approach can be applied to other species.

It will be interesting to compare the new findings to what we know about brain and spine development in animals. The study shows how nature can survive big changes if we don't control the climate crisis.

The world's most diverse group of organisms are the result of simple marine animals such as Cardiodictyon giving rise to the world's most diverse group of organisms.

The research has appeared in a journal.