Research based on a collection of fossils from the Burgess Shale shows a bizarre-looking animal with three eyes that sheds light on the evolution of the brain and head of insects and spiders.
The study, published in the journal Current Biology, looked at 268 specimens collected in the 1980s and 1990s from a site in Yoho National Park in British Columbia and stored at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
"We get so much information that we couldn't get from the ordinary fossil record -- things like features of the brain. We can see how many segments the brain of this animal is made up of. We can see the processing centres for visual information extending into the eyes of the animal, giving us all kinds of information about the neuroanatomy of this extinct organism.
"We think that third segment was added somewhere along that branch that is the tree of life between the divergency of the velvet worms and the modern arthropods," explained Moysiuk. Moysiuk said the right conditions were needed to preserve the small, compressed fossils of an animal that was about 20 centimetres in size.
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