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| Jaw-inspiring: Ancient fish was piv |
| Jaw-inspiring: Ancient fish was pivotal in evolution of face, researchers find
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| UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
, 13-February-2014
7:3:45 AM |
| Let's face it. It's easy to take for granted that mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish - vertebrates just like people - have a face. But it has not always been the case.
The first creatures with a backbone - jawless fish from hundreds of millions of years ago - did not. Scientists have been eager to learn how the evolution of the face unfolded.
A small, primitive armored fish known as Romundina that swam the seas 415 million years ago and whose fossilized remains were unearthed in the Canadian Arctic is providing some revealing answers.
With Romundina at the center of their work, Swedish and French researchers described in a study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday the step-by-step development of the face as jawless vertebrates evolved into creatures with jaws.
The evolution of the jaw led to development of the face.
The researchers scanned the internal structures of Romundina's skull using high-energy X-rays at the European Synchrotron (ESRF) in France, then digitally reconstructed the anatomy in three dimensions.
Romundina, one of the earliest jawed fish, was found to boast a mix of primitive features seen in jawless fish and more modern ones that appear in fish with jaws. Its head had a distinctive anatomy, with a very short forebrain and an odd "upper lip" extending forward in front of the nose, they said.
Romundina was a type of fish called a placoderm that thrived during the Silurian and Devonian periods in Earth's history but disappeared about 360 million years ago. It was small, but some placoderms like the fearsome Dunkleosteus became apex predators bigger than a great white shark.
Per Ahlberg, an expert in vertebrate evolution at Uppsala University in Sweden, said Romundina was roughly 8 inches (20 cm) long, had a small defensive spine on its back and had jaws without real teeth but with flat crushing plates.
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