London, July 1 (IANS) Scientits have discovered 515-million-year-old eye fossils which prove that ancient animals had excellent vision and could even see in the dark.
Resembling ‘squashed eyes from a recently swatted fly,’ the fossils were found by a team of researchers on Kangaroo Island in South Australia.
The study said the eyes have more than 3,000 lenses, making them more powerful than any known eye fossils of a similar age, reports the journal Nature.
It is most likely to have been a ‘shrimp-like creature’ as the fossil eyes are typical of the compound eyes of jointed-legged arthropods (insects, millipedes, crabs and spiders).
Greg Edgecombe, Natural History Museum palaeontologist, part of the research team, said the eyes would have belonged to a predator that must have been able to see in dim light, according to the Telegraph.
‘This find is significant because it indicates that sharp vision like we see today in flies and lobsters must have evolved very rapidly,’ said Edgecombe.
‘This would have happened soon after the first predators appeared during the evolutionary burst called the Cambrian Explosion around 540 million years ago,’ he said.
‘These eyes would give animals a tremendous advantage as they were better adapted to avoid predators, and find food and shelter. Finding the Australian eyes allows us to date the origin of sophisticated vision,’ added Edgecombe.
