A remarkably well-preserved brain has been discovered in a 300-million-year-old fossil of a fish from Kansas.
Philippe Janvier of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and his colleagues used X-rays from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, to peer inside the skulls of iniopterygians, extinct relations of modern sharks and ratfish.
In one skull (pictured), they imaged a dense calcium phosphate structure. Its shape and relationship to nerve locations suggest that it is a brain, mineralized by phosphate-fixing microbes before the soft tissue could decay. The researchers hope that other vertebrates fossilized in similar conditions might yield further preserved organs, potentially throwing light on brain evolution.
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Palaeontology: Brain box. Nature 458, 128 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/458128a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/458128a