The fossilized skull of a 455-million-year-old fish reveals an anatomy that's completely new to the study of vertebrates, bridging a knowledge gap of 100 million years.
, suggest the early development of the vertebrate brain's protective dome was more complex than scientists thought.
"This fills a major gap in our understanding of the evolution of the skull of all vertebrates, ultimately including humans,"Richard Dearden, a palaeobiologist from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands and lead author of the new paper. The evolution of the braincase – a crucial structure in all vertebrates that prevents the delicate nervous system from being squashed – is poorly understood.
The fact they are distinctly different in living jawed and jawless fishes, however, might give us some clues., or jawed vertebrates, from a lineage of jawless ancestors. Unfortunately t here's a gap in the fossil record between the earliest vertebrates and modern fish, with the earliest known preserved three-dimensional vertebrate braincase dating to some 100 million years after the first vertebrates appeared.period are some of the earliest vertebrates discovered to date, but little is known about their anatomy due to the lack of articulated remains. Until now, that is.
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