THE first fossil brain ever found is that of a 300-million-year-old fish.
Alan Pradel of the French National Natural History Museum in Paris and his team took X-rays of four iniopterygian fish fossils from the Carboniferous period, aiming to infer the size and shape of the brains from the skulls.
Pradel was stunned to realise that a faint object 鈥渓ike a ghost鈥� inside one skull meant that the brain itself had been preserved (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ).
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A film of bacteria seems to have coated the brain after death, which removed oxygen and prevented its degradation, so other brains might survive inside similarly preserved fossils.
