Fossilized Nervous System is Oldest, Most Detailed Ever Found

Fossilized Chengjiangocaris kunmingensis from the early Cambrian period. (Credit: Jie Yang/Yunnan University, China) A group of researchers working in South China recently unearthed the fossil remains of 520-million-year-old, centipede-like creatures whose central nervous systems had been preserved in remarkable detail, down to individual nerves. Chengjiangocaris kunmingensis was a small creature, just 2 to 4 inches long, with a segmented, armor-plated body and a heart-shaped head shield. As part of a now-extinct group called fuxianhuidae, it walked the Earth on its 80 pairs of legs during the Cambrian period, a time around 500 million years ago when primitive organisms began to evolve in many directions, causing an explosion of biodiversity. Most of the animal phyla we know today first started to show up in the fossil record during the Cambrian, and that’s what makes C. kunmingensis so important. A team of paleontologists led by Jie Yang says that studying its well preserved central nervous system could help them better understand how the nervous systems of today’s crustaceans and creepy-crawlies evolved. They published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.