The 300,000,000 Year Old Fish Brain

(A tip of my teacher's hat to Brock, who first pointed this story out to me.)

Paleontologist have recently discovered a 300-million year old fossilized fish brain. It represents the oldest fossilized brain ever found. As Carl Zimmer describes it:

In recent years, scientists have been able to get important clues about brains by scanning the brain cases. They can create virtual fossils in their computers that reveal a wealth of details. Alan Pradel of the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris and his colleagues recently scanned a 300-million-year old fossil of an ancient relative of sharks called Sibyrhynchus denisoni. They recognized many details of the skull. But when they looked closer, they saw something they could not quite believe. They saw something that looked like a fossilized brain.

[...]

Pradel and his colleagues were pleased enough to see the braincase of Sibyrhynchus, but they were stunned to see a chunk of rock deep inside that looked like a very small fish brain (and I do mean small–its length was 7 mm, or a quarter of an inch). Fossils sometimes form strange structures, but Pradel and his colleagues are pretty sure that they’re actually seeing a brain. It has the shape of a ratfish brain, including the various sections of a ratfish brain. And it even has nerves that extend to the right places to connect to the eyes and ears.

The video below shows a 3-D model of the skull, brain case, and brain: