todropscience: DOLLOCARIS, A PREDATOR OF THE JURASSIC WAS ALL...

[SciTechPress]

todropscience:

DOLLOCARIS, A PREDATOR OF THE JURASSIC  WAS ALL EYES.

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.  

Today, paleontologists 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 South East France. The study was published 19 January in Nature Communications.

This arthropod called Dollocaris ingens 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.

- Eye structure of Dollocaris ingens.

As a group, the Thylacocephala survived to the Upper Cretaceous. Beyond this, there remains much uncertainty concerning fundamental aspects of the thylacocephalan anatomy, mode of life, and relationship to the Crustacea, with whom they have always been cautiously aligned.

• Reference (Open access): Vannier et al.2015  Exceptional preservation of eye structure in arthropod visual predators from the Middle Jurassic. Nature Communications

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