Fish eye under the lens

Fishy fossils ... ancient eyeball capsules

A University of Queensland researcher has uncovered the oldest-known fossilised eye capsules from jawed fishes.

Palaeontologist, Dr Carole Burrow, from UQ’s School of Integrative Biology, discovered the 410-million-year-old specimens in central New South Wales, and her research is shedding new light on the evolution of eyes in early vertebrates.

“Even though they probably have no modern descendants, placoderms were the most primitive group of jawed fish, and their eyeballs give us an insight into what came before modern fish,” Dr Burrow said.

Dr Burrow’s research was also the first to use x-ray microtomography to investigate the threedimensional structure of small vertebrate fossils.

Previous work on the few other fossil eye capsules known have been based on visual examinations of fractured sections.

She said the x-ray microtomography analysis allowed her and her colleagues to see amazing detail of the inner and outer structure.

“We were able to prove that these fish had an extra muscle attachment to the eye,” she said.

To find such intact fossils was exciting, said Dr Burrow, as each eye was only about half-a-centimetre in diameter.

Dr Burrow’s work was recently published in the scientific journal, Micron.

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