Exceptional preservation of eye structure in arthropod visual predators from the Middle Jurassic

Jean Vannier (), Brigitte Schoenemann (), Thomas Gillot, Sylvain Charbonnier and Euan Clarkson
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Jean Vannier: Université Lyon 1, UMR 5276 du CNRS, Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon: Terre, Planètes, Environnement, Bâtiment GEODE,
Brigitte Schoenemann: Biocenter Cologne, Institute of Zoology, University of Cologne
Thomas Gillot: Université Lyon 1, UMR 5276 du CNRS, Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon: Terre, Planètes, Environnement, Bâtiment GEODE,
Sylvain Charbonnier: Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Centre de Recherche sur la Paléobiodiversité et les Paléoenvironnements (CR2P, UMR 7207), Sorbonne Universités-MNHN, CNRS, UPMC-Paris6, Case postale 38
Euan Clarkson: University of Edinburgh, School of Geosciences

Nature Communications, 2016, vol. 7, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract 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. Here, we 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 SE France. This arthropod 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.

Date: 2016
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DOI: 10.1038/ncomms10320

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