title: Exceptional preservation of eye structure in arthropod visual predators from the Middle Jurassic.
abstract: Vision has revolutionized the way animals explore their environment and interact with each other and rapidly became a major driving force in animal evolution. However, direct evidence of how ancient animals could perceive their environment is extremely difficult to obtain because internal eye structures are almost never fossilized. Here, we reconstruct with unprecedented resolution the three-dimensional structure of the huge compound eye of a 160-million-year-old thylacocephalan arthropod from the La Voulte exceptional fossil biota in SE France. This arthropod had about 18,000 lenses on each eye, which is a record among extinct and extant arthropods and is surpassed only by modern dragonflies. Combined information about its eyes, internal organs and gut contents obtained by X-ray microtomography lead to the conclusion that this thylacocephalan arthropod was a visual hunter probably adapted to illuminated environments, thus contradicting the hypothesis that La Voulte was a deep-water environment.
authors.affiliation: Université Lyon 1, UMR 5276 du CNRS, Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon: Terre, Planètes, Environnement, Bâtiment GEODE, 2, rue Raphaël Dubois, 69622 Villeurbanne, France.
authors.forename: Jean
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Vannier
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurobiology/Animal Physiology, Biocenter Cologne, Institute of Zoology, University of Cologne, Zülpicherstrasse 47b, D-50674 Köln, Germany.|Institute of Biology Education (Zoology), University of Cologne, Herbert Lewinstrasse 2, D-50931 Köln, Germany.
authors.forename: Brigitte
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Schoenemann
authors.affiliation: Université Lyon 1, UMR 5276 du CNRS, Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon: Terre, Planètes, Environnement, Bâtiment GEODE, 2, rue Raphaël Dubois, 69622 Villeurbanne, France.|Centre de Géosciences, MINES-ParisTech, 33, rue Saint Honoré, 77300 Fontainebleau, France.
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Gillot
authors.affiliation: Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Centre de Recherche sur la Paléobiodiversité et les Paléoenvironnements (CR2P, UMR 7207), Sorbonne Universités-MNHN, CNRS, UPMC-Paris6, Case postale 38, 57 rue Cuvier, F-75005 Paris, France.
authors.forename: Sylvain
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Charbonnier
authors.affiliation: University of Edinburgh, School of Geosciences, King's Buildings, West Mains Road, Edinburgh EH9 3JW, UK.
authors.forename: Euan
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Clarkson
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001181:Arthropods / Q000033:anatomy & histology* / Q000648:ultrastructure*; D054910:Compound Eye, Arthropod / Q000033:anatomy & histology* / Q000648:ultrastructure*; D005580:Fossils; D011309:Preservation, Biological