Exceptional preservation of eye structure in arthropod visual predators from the Middle Jurassic

Nature Communications
J VannierEuan N K Clarkson

Abstract

Vision has revolutionized the way animals explore their environment and interact with each other and rapidly became a major driving force in animal evolution. However, direct evidence of how ancient animals could perceive their environment is extremely difficult to obtain because internal eye structures are almost never fossilized. Here, we reconstruct with unprecedented resolution the three-dimensional structure of the huge compound eye of a 160-million-year-old thylacocephalan arthropod from the La Voulte exceptional fossil biota in SE France. This arthropod had about 18,000 lenses on each eye, which is a record among extinct and extant arthropods and is surpassed only by modern dragonflies. Combined information about its eyes, internal organs and gut contents obtained by X-ray microtomography lead to the conclusion that this thylacocephalan arthropod was a visual hunter probably adapted to illuminated environments, thus contradicting the hypothesis that La Voulte was a deep-water environment.

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Citations

Mar 2, 2017·Science Advances·Arnaud BrayardGilles Escarguel
Dec 6, 2017·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Brigitte SchoenemannEuan N K Clarkson
Aug 16, 2018·Royal Society Open Science·Jean VannierJean-Bernard Caron
Jun 9, 2019·Nature Communications·Gerhard ScholtzJason A Dunlop
Mar 13, 2021·Arthropod Structure & Development·Brigitte Schoenemann
Sep 24, 2016·Current Opinion in Neurobiology·Paloma T Gonzalez-BellidoKarin Nordström
Apr 9, 2021·Nature Communications·Brigitte Schoenemann, Euan N K Clarkson

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Methods Mentioned

BETA
X-ray
electron microscopy

Software Mentioned

Materialise Mimics Innovation Suite
XTM
Remipedia

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