BEYOND STONE: This fossil of a Cambrian euarthropod, Fuxianhuia protensa, shows black traces of preserved neural tissue.X. MA ET AL., CURR BIOL, 25:2969-75, 2015
In 2002, Xiaoya Ma spent most of her days at Yunnan University in China freeing fossilized arthropods from their rocky tombs. Under a microscope, she scraped away sediment with a needle to reveal parts of the fossils that weren’t exposed during field collection. For one particular specimen, a wormlike arthropod ancestor called Paucipodia inermis, Ma saw some unusual shapes as she removed extraneous material from around the head—they resembled ganglia and nerve cords. “I didn’t initially realize what they were,” Ma says. “Slowly, slowly, it came to me that these might be brain structures.”
Little did she know, Ma was about to galvanize the field of neuropaleontology—the study of fossilized brains and their evolutionary context. Researchers had published brief descriptions of fossilized neural tissue remnants ...
