Abstract
Brain anatomy provides key evidence for ray-finned fish relationships, but two key limitations obscure our understanding of neuroanatomical evolution in this major vertebrate group. First, the deepest branching living lineages are separated from the group's common ancestor by hundreds of millions of years, with indications that aspects of their brain morphology--like other aspects of their anatomy--are specialised relative to primitive conditions. Second, there are no direct constraints on brain morphology in the earliest ray-finned fishes beyond the coarse picture provided by cranial endocasts: natural or virtual infillings of void spaces within the skull. Here we report brain and cranial nerve soft-tissue preservation in Coccocephalichthys wildi, a ~319-million-year-old (Myr) ray-finned fish. This oldest example of a well-preserved vertebrate brain provides a unique window into neural anatomy deep within ray-finned fish phylogeny. Coccocephalichthys indicates a more complicated pattern of brain evolution than suggested by living species alone, highlighting cladistian apomorphies and providing temporal constraints on the origin of traits uniting all extant ray-finned fishes. Our findings, along with a growing set of studies in other animal groups, point to the significance of ancient soft tissue preservation in understanding the deep evolutionary assembly of major anatomical systems outside of the narrow subset of skeletal tissues.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
