If you’ve ever wondered what a 520 million-year-old brain looks like, you’re in luck, thanks to an incredible recent fossil discovery.
This is the super-rare fossil of a very, very old shrimp-y thing that lived in the oceans over half a billion years ago.
He’s called Chengjiangocaris kunmingensis (good luck with that) and lived 300 million years before the dinosaurs. That’s pretty old, but not as old as the new fossil on the block.
This fossil was recently found of C. kunmingensis which is a whopping 520 million years old and also shows the preserved nervous system of the little guy.
From top to bottom you can see the pinky-purple brain and ventral nerve cord descending — a bit like a human’s spine.
You might not think a preserved nervous system makes for edge-of-your-seat thrills, but scientists have been keen to uncover just how the single-celled organisms that dominated the planet suddenly (or, over about a million years) evolved into complex life.
Also, fossils only usually preserve bones, teeth and hard parts of a dead animal. On this occasion, the mud this creature ended up in preserved a huge amount of soft tissue.
And this closeup shows the nerves in the ventral nerve cord of C. kunmingensis, the ancestor of all crabs, shrimps and insects we see today.
And this guy, known as Metaspriggina walcotti, was swimming around at the same time as our fossilized friend with a shiny, newly-evolved spine.
Making him the ancestor of all vertabrates, from your grandma to your dog and just about everything else with a spine. Amazing.