Fossilised Brain Of Three-Eyed Creature From 500 Million Years Ago Discovered By Scientists

Scientists are researching the fossilised brain of a creature that lived 500 million years ago to learn more about how evolution works.

This ancient fossil of a three-eyed creature, named the Stanleycaris hirpex, swam the Earth's oceans hundreds of millions of years ago seeking out smaller sea creatures to gobble up.

With two eyes on stalks and a third implanted into the middle of it's head, a mouth full of teeth and a set of spiny claws, perhaps it's for the best that we don't have these creatures around any longer.

What really has scientists interested is the fossilised brains of these creatures and how they compare to insects of the modern day.

See, our old friend Stanleycaris is part of an extinct branch of the arthropod family called Radiodonta, which are distant relations of insects and spiders we get crawling around these days.

Interestingly, our 500-million-year-old friend has a brain made up of two segments rather than the three the insects we deal with these days have.

This discovery could help shed new light on the way creatures have evolved over hundreds of millions of years, filling in some of the past steps on the evolutionary cycle to help us better understand how things are different now.

At about 20cm long, Stanley would have been about the size of a human hand and would have spent their time hunting down smaller prey creatures which would have been about the size of a finger.

The research into the Stanleycaris brain is being led by Joseph Moysiuk, based at the Royal Ontario Museum, who explained the creature probably used its extra eye to chase down faster moving prey.

He said the information learned about the prawn-like creature 'kind of jives that when we see the evolution of the first predators' and that the various eyes were 'maybe performing different tasks for the organism'.

The fossils being studied now were discovered in the Canadian Rockies during the 80s and 90s and there are so well preserved that Moysiuk says it's 'as if we were looking at an animal that died yesterday'.

The study is going over 268 individual specimens, of which 84 of the fossils still have the brain preserved after hundreds of millions of years.

Moysiuk described the well preserved fossils as 'like a Rosetta Stone' which can help researchers make connections and fill in details of other creatures whose evolutionary descendants are still around today.