Three hundred and eighty million years ago, the Gogo Lagerstätte was one of the first coral reefs. Now, this massive outcrop lies in the middle of the Australian desert. Its limestone crags border an expanse of black, silty soil, which contains immaculately preserved fossils from the Devonian period.
Since 1940, researchers have collected fossils of ancient fish hidden inside the rocks scattered throughout Gogo. A few decades ago, they made a surprising discovery: The oxygen-poor environment of the ancient oceans not only preserved the bones of early vertebrates, it also preserved their soft tissue and organs. And in a paper published in Science today (September 15), scientists in Australia report that they have, for the first time, visualized the soft organs inside multiple specimens of our early jawed ancestors. To their surprise, they found striking similarities between the internal body plan of these ancient vertebrates and modern-day animals, including humans.
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