There have been some sinful examples of soft tissue preservation in fossils over the preceding few years , fromapparent red blood cellsin dinosaur pearl tofeathers and pigmentsin other birds . A new circle of fossil that have come out of south China , date to around 515 million old age ago , show something else astonishing : the saving of the creatures ' nervous system , include the brain , nerve cord , and individual nerves . Thought to be the oldest and substantially - preserved unquiet system ever chance , they once belong to an animal known asChengjiangocaris kunmingensis , and are described in a paper published in PNAS .
“ The animal itself is an early arthropod , ” explained Dr. Javier Ortega - Hernández , from theUniversity of Cambridge ’s Department of Zoology , to IFLScience . “ The fogy are approximately 515 million class old , so really near to the origin of animals . And we have a brass electric cord , so that is a really skillful insight into early animate being phylogenesis . ” Today , arthropods are represented by insects , crustacean , and spider . What made the fossil remarkable was the exquisite level of preservation of the flighty system .
“ you’re able to see this really lean strand which goes all throughout the organic structure , and you’re able to that it has these spots which retell themselves a lot , and those would fit with ganglion , ” Dr. Ortega - Hernández continues . “ Ganglia are masses of nervous cells , which occur in each of the segments of the arthropod . ” All arthropods have segment bodies , and each section has its own ganglion that contain the pair of leg , not unalike to a " mini brainpower " that keeps everything in question . Finding this in the fogey arthropods was nice to see , but expect .
What the investigator did n’t await , however , was the contingent of the mettle conserve branch off from the ganglion . In all living arthropods , each ganglion gives rise to only a couple of foresightful , incredibly fine nerves that process the individual segments . The dodo , however , show dozen of such nerves , something that ’s only seen today in a animate being closely related to arthropod known as velvet worms . This heavy branching , hint the researchers , shows that it is a very transmissible feature that was inherit from a velvet worm - like root . Since then , there has been a loss of these neurological gadget characteristic in modern arthropods .
But how can such ok delicate tissue paper manage to get fossilized and preserved for over 500 million years ? The answer might lie down in what precisely the nervous system is made up of . “ thing like the neural system or the gut get fossilized counter - intuitively , ” says Dr. Ortega - Hernández . Why this happens is conceive to be “ due to the chemically responsive musical composition of adjacent lipid - rich ganglia , ” he pen in the paper .
Image in text : Complete specimen of Chengjiangocaris kunmingensis , showing the private ganglia in incredible detail . Jie Yang / Yunnan University , China
