Abstract
Abstract The central nervous system (CNS) presents unique insight into the behaviors and ecology of extant and extinct animal groups. However, neurological tissues are delicate and prone to rapid decay, and thus their occurrence as fossils is mostly confined to Cambrian Burgess Shale–type deposits and Cenozoic amber inclusions. We describe an exceptionally preserved CNS in the horseshoe crab Euproops danae from the late Carboniferous (Moscovian) Mazon Creek Konservat-Lagerstätte in Illinois, USA. The E. danae CNS demonstrates that the general prosomal synganglion organization has remained essentially unchanged in horseshoe crabs for >300 m.y., despite substantial morphological and ecological diversification in that time. Furthermore, it reveals that the euarthropod CNS can be preserved by molding in siderite and suggests that further examples may be present in the Mazon Creek fauna. This discovery fills a significant temporal gap in the fossil record of euarthropod CNSs and expands the taphonomic scope for preservation of detailed paleoneuroanatomical data in the Paleozoic to siderite concretion Lagerstätten of marginal marine deposits.
Highlights
The central nervous system (CNS) plays a critical role in animal functions, behavior, and ecology, and contains valuable morphological data that inform the evolution of complex organisms (Schmidt-Rhaesa et al, 2015)
The discovery of paleoneuroanatomy in E. danae is significant because xiphosurids are the only wholly aquatic extant order of euchelicerates, and their fossil record is critical for MATERIALS AND METHODS We reviewed E. danae specimens in the Yale
The morphology of the internal structure consists of a fusiform ring oriented along the sagittal axis with seven paired and regularly spaced lobe-like lateral extensions that generally increase in length posteriorly (Figs. 1B and 1D)
Summary
The central nervous system (CNS) plays a critical role in animal functions, behavior, and ecology, and contains valuable morphological data that inform the evolution of complex organisms (Schmidt-Rhaesa et al, 2015). The lipid-rich composition of the CNS makes it prone to rapid decay (Sansom, 2016), recent research demonstrates that neurological tissues can be preserved as carbonaceous compressions in Cambrian animal macrofossils from open-marine deposits (Edgecombe et al, 2015; Strausfeld et al, 2016; Ortega-Hernández et al, 2019; Table S1 in the Supplemental Material). We describe an exceptionally well-p reserved CNS in the belinurid Euproops danae (Meek and Worthen, 1865) from the Pennsylvanian (Moscovian) Mazon Creek Konservat- Lagerstätte in Illinois, USA. The discovery of paleoneuroanatomy in E. danae is significant because xiphosurids (horseshoe crabs) are the only wholly aquatic extant order of euchelicerates, and their fossil record is critical for
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