Scientists Say Ancient Mega Clawed Creature Had Spider-like Brain
Posted on October 21, 2013
Scientists have found the fossilized remains of an ancient mega clawed creature. The creature crawled or swam in the ocean about 520 million years ago. Scientists say the creature, megacheiran Alalcomenaeus, is a distant relative of scorpions and spiders. The 3-centimeter long fossil was unearthed from the Chengjiang formation near Kunming in southwest China.
The researchers were led by University of Arizona Regents' Professor Nick Strausfeld and London Natural History Museum's Greg Edgecombe. The nervous system of the creature was exquisitely preserved in the fossilized remains. It is the earliest known complete nervous system. The image below shows the fossil specimen with the superimposed colors of a microscopy technique that revealed the distribution of chemical elements in the fossil.
Strausfeld, the senior author of the study and a Regents' Professor in the UA's Department of Neuroscience, says, "We now know that the megacheirans had central nervous systems very similar to today's horseshoe crabs and scorpions. This means the ancestors of spiders and their kin lived side by side with the ancestors of crustaceans in the Lower Cambrian."
The research was published here in the journal Nature.