A 380 million-year-old fish preserves the oldest heart - science

Heart 380 million yearsthe oldest ever found, along with a fossilized stomach, intestines and liver The remains of a loose fish.

The new research, published in the journal ‘Science’, has found that the location of organs in the body Arthropods, an extinct class of jawed fish that flourished during the Devonian period, 419.2 million years ago and 358.9 million years ago, it was similar to the anatomy of modern sharks, providing new and vital evolutionary clues.

Lead researcher Professor Kate Triangstick, from Curtin University’s School of Molecular and Life Sciences and the Western Australian Museum, stresses that the discovery is remarkable given that the soft tissues of ancient species are rarely preserved and that 3D protection has been rare to find.

“As a paleontologist who has studied fossils for more than 20 years, I was surprised to find a beautifully preserved 3D heart in a 380 million year old ancestor,” Trinagetic said in a statement. A series of small steps, but these ancient fossils indicate a greater leap between jawless and jawless vertebrates. The hearts of these fish were literally in their mouths and under their gills, just like the sharks of today.”

This research presents, for the first time, 3D model of an intricate “S”-shaped heart in an arthropod It is made up of two rooms with a smaller one located at the top.

Professor Tringstik points out that these features were developed in such early vertebrates, providing a unique window into how the head and neck region changed to accommodate the jaws, a crucial stage in the evolution of our bodies.

“For the first time, we can see all the members together fish with rudimentary jawand we were particularly surprised to learn that they weren’t that different from us,” says Trinagistic.

“However, there was a fundamental difference: the livers were large and allowed the fish to stay fresh, just like modern sharks. The bladder, but importantly, was that we found no evidence of lungs in any of the extinct armored fish we examined, suggesting that They evolved independently in later bony fish.”

The Gogo Formation, in the Kimberley region of Western Australiawhere the fossils were collected, was originally a large coral reef.

With the help of scientists from the Australian Organization for Nuclear Science and Technology in Sydney and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France, the researchers used synchrotron beams of neutrons and X-rays to scan the samples, which are still embedded in the limestone, and constructed 3-D images of the soft tissues within them based on the different densities of the minerals they found. It is deposited by bacteria and the surrounding rock matrix.

This new discovery of mineralized organs, combined with previous findings of musculoskeletal and embryogenesis, makes the gogo arthropod the most complete jawed vertebrate and sheds light on the evolutionary transformation in the line of living jawed vertebrates, which includes mammals and humans.

Co-author Professor John Long, of Flinders University, said: “These new discoveries of soft organs in these ancient fish are truly the stuff of dreams for paleontologists, as these fossils are without a doubt the best preserved in the world for this time.”

“They prove the value of juju fossils in understanding the great strides of our distant evolution,” he adds. “Jojo has provided us with the earliest worlds, from the origins of the genus to the oldest vertebrate heart, and is now a fossil and stressed that it is time to seriously consider the possibility of declaring this site a World Heritage Site.”

Co-author Professor Per Ahlberg from Uppsala University, Sweden, said: “What really distinguishes the gogo fish is that its soft tissues are preserved in three dimensions. Most cases of soft tissue preservation are found in flat fossils, where the fine anatomy is little more than a speck in the rock. We We are also very fortunate that modern scanning techniques allow us to study these fragile soft tissues without destroying them. Two decades ago, the project would have been impossible.”

European press