Scientists have found a nervous system in an ancient fossil with resemblance of a brain, and nerve cords extending into the species Torso BBC News reported.
"The nervous system is one of the most reliable tool-kits we have," Greg Edgecombe of the Natural History Museum in London told BBC News. "What we've been working with is fossils with very fine anatomical preservation from the cambrian period. These have given us information about brains, the nerve cords, and the neural tissue that goes into the eyes."
The fossil was found in South China, and is classified as a genus Alacomenaeus. These have "segmented bodies," and mobile body parts, which allow them to move around.
"People like myself who are mad keen on creepy crawlies want to understand how very strange early arthropods relate to living ones," Edgecombe said in a statement. "By having access to the nervous system it allows us to study the evolutionary relationships of very ancient fossils using the same kind of information that we would use for living animals."
Researchers put the fossil in a CT scanner, and investigated how it differed from other arthropods like it. Scientists then used 3D software to examine aspects they could not see on the fossil's surface.
"It is very exciting to use new techniques to successfully reveal such a complete central nervous system from a 520 million-year old fossil, and in such detail," Xiaoya Ma co-author of the work, and the Natural History Museum told BBC News.
The report was published in The International Journal of Science, which allowed researchers to discover more about different types of species.
"We now know that the megaheirans had central nervous systems very similar to today's horseshoe crabs and scorpions," Nicholas Strausfeld, a researcher on the team told BBC News. "This means the ancestors of spiders and their kin lived side by side with ancestors of crustaceans in lower cambrian. Based on their location, we can now say that the biting mouthparts in spiders, and their relatives evolved from these appendages."
