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Here's a brainteaser: Do the 520-million-year-old fossils of an ancient, bug-like creature actually show a silhouette of its brains? Or are these blobby shapes in its head merely fossilized bacteria? According to a new study, the fossilized structures in the Cambrian-period creature's head aren't brainy remains, but rather fossilized bacterial mats, called biofilms. However, not everyone is on board with this interpretation. The researchers who originally discovered the brains are standing by their results, and other paleontologists Live Science interviewed agree with them. [Fabulous Fossils: Gallery of Earliest Animal Organs] The creature in question, Fuxianhuia protensa, is an early arthropod,...

Conventional wisdom says that brains don't fossilize, but these seven fossilized brains beg to differ. An arthropod called Fuxianhuia protensa, which lived on the ocean floor about 520 million years ago, would have looked much like today's shrimp, say paleontologists. Thanks to fossilized remains, we now know that its brain was also similar to those of today's crustaceans. A team led by paleontologist Xiaoya Ma examined seven specimens of the now -- extinct creature with a scanning electron microscope, and they found traces of a brain -- in the form of a flattened carbon film -- in each one... Of...

Cockroaches and other insects belong to a group called the arthropods, which arose some 540 million years ago. A new Chinese fossil is yielding new insights into how the arthropod brain evolved and shows that within the first 20 million years of the group's emergence, the arthropod brain had already become surprisingly advanced. The new findings are based on a three-inch-long fossil arthropod known as Fuxianhuia protensa, found in what is now China's Yunnan Province and were described online October 10 in Nature (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group)... Fuxianhuia's body is understandably primitive, which is par for...