TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – Animal the owner of three eyes with wing-like fins once explored the shallow seas 500 million years ago, in the Cambrian period. Hunts smaller animals using the advantages of its visual system, Stanleycaris hirpex was the first known arthropod to have three eyes. Its relatives are insects, arachnids or eight-legged animals and crustaceans or crustaceans.
S. hirpex it is about the size of a human arm and has two eyeballs with hundreds of lenses protruding outward on each side of the head, plus a larger third eye in the center of the head. Living among other animals the size of a human finger’s finger, S. hirpex the possibility of using his visual system to chase his fast-moving prey.
“It’s just like when we look at the evolution of the first predatory races, we also see the evolution of this complex sensory system where we have different eyeballs, which may have played different tasks for that organism,” said Joseph Moysiuk, researcher in palaeontology and evolutionary biology. from the University of Toronto, Canada.
As has also been published in the Journal of Current Biology, July 8, 2022, Moysiuk and his colleagues recently examined hundreds of fossils from S. hirpex excavated from the Cambrian Burgess Shale in the Rocky Mountains in British Columbia, Canada. The fossils are intact and many of the 268 specimens still have soft tissue, including brain tissue, nerves, and reflective material in the visual system.
“When you cut one of these rocks apart at the site, you can see their eyes shining in the sun–after 506 million years,” Moysiuk said, adding, “So it was very clear from when we started researching it that this organism had three eye.”
Body S. hirpex consisting of 17 segments, has two pairs of stiff and hard tails nearly a third of its body long and sharp claws that can scratch its prey on the sea floor bringing it straight into its mouth–the owner of toothed jaws. “It used to be a cruel animal,” Moysiuk said.
Moysiuk suspects one large central eye combined with two lateral eyes is a common form of early invertebrate animals, before evolving into one or more pairs of eyes in later species. As an example, Lyrarapax The 520 million-year-old, belonging to the same group, of early arthropods called radiodonta, has a similar structure on the forehead that is likely the eyeball.
The latest findings, according to Moysiuk, add to the unique profile commonly found in radiodonta. The animals often have a pair of protruding and elongated eyes, as well as oddly shaped organs.
NEW SCIENTIST, CELL
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