ANCIENT eyes fossilised in stone on Kangaroo Island show the world's first top predator had "superb vision", scientists say. Evolutionary biologist Dr Mike Lee, from the South Australian Museum, says the "new set of eyes" belonged to a fearsome hunter that lived 515 million years ago.
"Anomalocaris is the stuff of nightmares and sci-fi movies," he said.
"It is considered to be at the top of the earliest food chains because of its large body size, formidable grasping claws at the front of its head and a circular mouth with razor-sharp serrations."
Until now, scientists knew very little about the way the animal saw the world.
The eyes from KI, however, were preserved in great detail.
UniSA Associate Professor Jim Jago said each eye was made up of more than 16,000 individual lenses.
"The animal obviously had very good eyesight," he said.
"Given that it was a predator, it must have been a pretty formidable sort of character.
"It would have been a huge advantage for this animal to have decent eyes. If you're hunting something, you would want to see what you're hunting."
The fossil record suggests this type of vision evolved before other animals - their prey - developed the armour-like defence of a hard exoskeleton, or legs for running away.
In the prestigious journal Nature today, the team argues sophisticated predators with acute vision, such as Anomalocaris, "placed considerable selective pressures on prey that would have influenced the 'arms race' that began during this important phase in early animal evolution".
The discovery is the latest in a long line of fabulous fossil finds from Emu Bay.
In 1952, Reg Sprigg first discovered fossils in the shale near the Emu Bay jetty in the Geological Survey of South Australia regional mapping program.
Since then, more than 50 species have been found, many of them new to science.
"We'll find other material, although clearly the more you hunt, you're going to find new stuff at a decreasing rate," Associate Professor Jago said.
"You'd hope after half a dozen trips you'd have a lot of it, but every trip we've been so far we've found something new."
Early Fossilised Eyes Found
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Originally Posted by J. Philip
