Dr. Fazale Rana of Reasons to Believe tweeted this – from the prestigious journal Nature!
Excerpt:
One could be forgiven for mistaking anomalocaridids for creatures from another world. The spade-shaped predators, which lived in the seas during the Cambrian — the geological era stretching from 541 million to 485 million years ago — had eyes that protruded from stalks and a pair of giant appendages on the sides of their mouths. But three stunningly well-preserved fossils found in China now show that the anomalocaridid brain was wired much like that of modern creatures called velvet worms, or onychophorans.
Both anomalocaridids and onychophorans belong to the arthropods, the group of invertebrates that includes spiders and insects and whose brain structures come in three main types. Two of those were already known to be very ancient, and the new fossils, described today in Nature, suggest that the third type — the neural architecture found in onychophorans — also has changed little over more than half a billion years of evolution.
Named Lyrarapax unguispinus, the three fossils reveal creatures that — at 8 centimetres long — are on the small side for anomalocaridids, some of which are thought to have been as long as 2 to 3 metres. But the fossils’ segmented bodies and frontal appendages are pure anomalocaridid, says Nicholas Strausfeld, a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who co-led the study.
What really grabbed Strausfeld’s attention was the creature’s brain, preserved flattened like a pressed flower: “I said, ‘Holy s**t, that’s an onychophoran brain!’” he recalls. The animal’s frontal appendages are connected to nerve bundles, or ganglia, in front of optic nerves. Both the ganglia and the optic nerves lead to a segmented brain. The layout is an uncanny match to the wiring of the velvet worm’s brain, Strausfeld says: “It’s completely unlike anything else in any other arthropod.”
The fossil record is pretty simple at a high-level. Single-celled organisms from the cooling of the Earth to the Cambrian explosion. All the phyla come in 5-10 million years in the Cambrian explosion – maybe less. No new phyla emerge after that. Does that look like naturalistic Darwinian evolution to you?
WINTERY KNIGHT 