Exceptional fossil preservation and evolution of the ray-finned fish brain

Rodrigo T. Figueroa, Danielle Goodvin, Matthew A. Kolmann, Michael I. Coates, Abigail M. Caron, Matt Friedman () and Sam Giles ()
Additional contact information
Rodrigo T. Figueroa: University of Michigan
Danielle Goodvin: University of Michigan
Matthew A. Kolmann: University of Michigan
Michael I. Coates: University of Chicago
Abigail M. Caron: University of Chicago
Matt Friedman: University of Michigan
Sam Giles: Natural History Museum

Nature, 2023, vol. 614, issue 7948, 486-491

Abstract: Abstract Brain anatomy provides key evidence for the relationships between ray-finned fishes1, but two major limitations obscure our understanding of neuroanatomical evolution in this major vertebrate group. First, the deepest branching living lineages are separated from the group’s common ancestor by hundreds of millions of years, with indications that aspects of their brain morphology—like other aspects of their anatomy2,3—are specialized relative to primitive conditions. Second, there are no direct constraints on brain morphology in the earliest ray-finned fishes beyond the coarse picture provided by cranial endocasts: natural or virtual infillings of void spaces within the skull4–8. Here we report brain and cranial nerve soft-tissue preservation in Coccocephalus wildi, an approximately 319-million-year-old ray-finned fish. This example of a well-preserved vertebrate brain provides a window into neural anatomy deep within ray-finned fish phylogeny. Coccocephalus indicates a more complicated pattern of brain evolution than suggested by living species alone, highlighting cladistian apomorphies1 and providing temporal constraints on the origin of traits uniting all extant ray-finned fishes1,9. Our findings, along with a growing set of studies in other animal groups10–12, point to the importance of ancient soft tissue preservation in understanding the deep evolutionary assembly of major anatomical systems outside of the narrow subset of skeletal tissues13–15.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05666-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:614:y:2023:i:7948:d:10.1038_s41586-022-05666-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05666-1

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().