Remarkable 380-Million-Year-Old Heart Discovered –

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TOPICS:Curtin UniversityEvolutionHeartPaleontology
By CURTIN UNIVERSITY SEPTEMBER 16, 2022

The Gogo fish fossil where the 380-million-year-old, 3D preserved heart was discovered by researchers. Pictured at the WA Museum. Credit: Yasmine Phillips, Curtin University

Palaeontologists have discovered a 380-million-year-old heart – the oldest ever found – alongside a separate fossilized liver, stomach, and intestine in an ancient jawed fish, shedding new light on the evolution of our own bodies.
Vital new evolutionary clues are provided by the research, which found that the position of the organs in the body of arthrodires is similar to modern shark anatomy. Arthrodires are an extinct class of armoured fishes that flourished through the Devonian period from 419.2 million years ago to 358.9 million years ago. The study was published on September 15, 2022, in the journal Science.

It was a remarkable discovery given that soft tissues of ancient species were rarely preserved and it was even rarer to find 3D preservation, said lead researcher John Curtin Distinguished Professor Kate Trinajstic, from Curtin’s School of Molecular and Life Sciences and the Western Australian Museum.

The preserved stomach of a Gogo fish fossil under the microscope. Pictured at the WA Museum. Credit: Yasmine Phillips, Curtin University
“As a palaeontologist who has studied fossils for more than 20 years, I was truly amazed to find a 3D and beautifully preserved heart in a 380-million-year-old ancestor,” Professor Trinajstic said.
Evolution is often thought of as a series of small steps, but these ancient fossils suggest there was a larger leap between jawless and jawed vertebrates. These fish literally have their hearts in their mouths and under their gills – just like sharks today.”
This research presents – for the very first time – the 3D model of a complex s-shaped heart in an arthrodire that is made up of two chambers with the smaller chamber sitting on top.
Heart position animation created by Alice Clement.
Professor Trinajstic said these features were advanced in such early vertebrates. This offers a unique window into how the head and neck region began to change to accommodate jaws, which was a critical stage in the evolution of our own bodies.
For the first time, we can see all the organs together in a primitive jawed fish, and we were especially surprised to learn that they were not so different from us,” Professor Trinajstic said.
“However, there was one critical difference – the liver was large and enabled the fish to remain buoyant, just like sharks today. Some of today’s bony fish such as lungfish and bichirs have lungs that evolved from swim bladders but it was significant that we found no evidence of lungs in any of the extinct armoured fishes we examined, which suggests that they evolved independently in the bony fishes at a later date.”

The fossils were collected in the Gogo Formation, located in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. It was originally a large reef.
Researchers used neutron beams and synchrotron x-rays to scan the specimens, still embedded in the limestone concretions, and constructed three-dimensional images of the soft tissues inside them based on the different densities of minerals deposited by the bacteria and the surrounding rock matrix. To accomplish this they enlisted the help of scientists at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization in Sydney and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France.
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