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Scientist Accidentally Discovers The Oldest Brain of Any Vertebrate - ScienceAlert
Feb 02, 2023 44 secs
Paleontologist Matt Friedman was surprised to discover a remarkably detailed 319-million-year-old fish brain fossil while testing out micro-CT scans for a broader project.

Usually, the only remaining traces of such ancient life are from more easily preserved hard parts of animals, like their bones, since soft tissues degrade quickly.

This prehistoric estuary fish likely hunted insects, small crustaceans, and cephalopods, chasing them with fins supported by bony rods called rays.

"Analyses place this taxon outside the group containing all living ray-finned fish species," University of Michigan paleontologist Rodrigo Figueroa and colleagues write in their paper.

"Details of the brain structure in Coccocephalus therefore have implications for interpretations of neural morphology during the early evolutionary stages of a major vertebrate lineage."

(Márcio L. Castro)Some brain features would have been lost to decay and the preservation process, but the team could still make out specific morphological details.

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