This is the first time in history that a fossil of a jawed vertebrate has been found as early as the Cambrian period, about 500 million years ago.
A team of researchers from the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom) and the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto (Canada) analyzed the fossils found in several places in the Burgess Shale, in the Rocky Mountains of Canada , one of the most valuable in the world discovering unprecedented details: the hundred of fossils of this fish had a notochord (the precursor of the spinal column), eyes with human-like functioning, and gills from which our jaws come.
This finding delimits that the precursor of vertebrates, our ancestors, is much older than we thought. The specimen has been classified as “Metaspriggina walcotti” and turns the graph of the evolution of vertebrates upside down . This fish, which would later evolve into species such as dinosaurs, mammals or humans, would have lived about 505 million years ago.
Thanks to the good conservation of these fossils, it has been seen that they were quite active swimmers due to the arrangement of their muscles, that they saw the world through a pair of wide-open eyes and that they perceived their environment through their nasal structures.
Regarding the presence of their particular gills, “obviously, the fish with jaws arrived later, but this is like the starting point, where everything is there and ready to go ,” says Jean-Bernard Caron, co-author of the study published in the journal Nature .
