The oldest brain ever discovered in a fossil

About the episode

The fossil in which a special discovery was made is 525 million years old. It was discovered in 1984, but only now have researchers been able to see what was really hidden inside.

It is a fossil of a 1.5cm worm-like sea creature with many small, stubby legs, much like a centipede. You can still find distant relatives in Australia, New Zealand and South America, but the animal itself is long gone.

It has long been thought that a brain does not fossilize and that it was totally futile to look for it in a fossil of such a small animal. We now know that this is possible.

In this new study, they not only found the tiny, worm-like animal brain, which they believe must be the oldest fossilized brain ever found, but they also compared it to the brains of living arthropods. For example, they saw that brain structures and the genes responsible for them match.

They also learned many other important things about the evolution of the animal’s nervous system. But could at least show that the brain blueprint of this group of animals comes from ancestors who crawled on the seabed hundreds of millions of years ago.

Read more: 525 Million Year Old Fossil Definitions Explaining Brain Evolution.