A team of scientists has discovered what could be the oldest eye in the world . The find has been made in Estonia and it is a 530-year-old fossil belonging to the extinct trilobite .
This animal, whose scientific name is Schmidtiellus reetae , inhabited during the Paleozoic Era between 251 and 541 million years ago, and was a species of ancestor of spiders and hard-shelled crabs that lived in coastal waters.
Thanks to the discovery, it has been possible to know a little better the interesting evolution of the sense of vision . The eye does not present great differences with this organ at present, so it indicates that the ocular structure has not changed in just half a billion years.
This member was partially worn , which allowed to study the interior, to know its structure and operation, as well as the differences with modern eyes.
The lead author of the study Professor Brigitte Schoenemann from the University of Cologne, Germany, says that “this may be the oldest example of an eye that can be found. The oldest specimens in the sediment layers below this fossil contain only traces of the original animals, which were too soft to fossilize and will have disintegrated over time. “
The vision of an entire era
The trilobite has an eye with a primitive compound shape; that means it was an organ made up of about 100 tiny visual cells called ommatidia , similar to a modern-day bee. In addition, the Schmidtiellus reetae curiously did not have a lens . This may be because the trilobite was a species without a suitable shell for its formation.
“This rare fossil shows us how primitive animals saw the world around them hundreds of millions of years ago,” according to Professor Euan Clarkson from the Faculty of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh, one of the study’s authors.
The researchers believe that the trilobites had poorer vision compared to current animals , but that it would have allowed them to distinguish predators and avoid obstacles. However, years later, the Schmidtiellus reetae from the Baltic coast would develop a better compound eye with a much higher image resolution than the fossil results show.
