Return to David's theory of evolution PART 2: more Cambrian (Evolution)

by David Turell , Friday, July 08, 2022, 16:26 (650 days ago) @ David Turell

A new complex sea monster described in the Cambrian with eyes to see, brains to interpret:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2327909-three-eyed-predator-stalked-the-seas-500-m...

"A three-eyed animal with wing-like fins once swam through shallow seas, using heightened visual perception to hunt smaller sea animals.

"Stanleycaris hirpex lived in the Cambrian Period about 500 million years ago, not long after the first eyes appeared in the fossil record. It is the first animal with three eyes known among the arthropods, the group containing insects, arachnids and crustaceans, but the researchers who described it think there may be others in which a third eye has been overlooked.

"S. hirpex was roughly the size of a human hand and had two protruding eyes with hundreds of lenses on each side of its head, plus a third, much larger eye in the middle.

"Living among finger-sized animals, it probably used its advanced visual system to chase down fast-moving prey, says Joseph Moysiuk at the University of Toronto in Canada.

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"Many of their 268 specimens even had their soft tissue intact – including brains, nerves and reflective materials in their visual systems. “When you split one of these rocks in the field, you can see their eyes gleaming – after 506 million years – in the sunlight. So it was pretty clear from when we first started looking at the organism that it had three eyes,” says Moysiuk.

"The animals had 17 body segments, two pairs of stiff blades along the lower third of its body and spiked claws that could probably rake prey right into its toothed jaws. “This was a pretty ferocious animal,” he says."

Comment: the Ediacaran's were frond-like sessile stalks with none of the attributes of these animals, some of whom appeared just 410,000 years later! It is well accepted the brain is the most complex item in the universe. These animals had brains with all the complexity that implies. It had to have had neurons precursors to ours. dhw's frantic estimate of 30,000 generations of adapting cells did this. Preposterous.