300 Million Year Old Fossil Fish Likely Had Color Vision

westlake writes Nature is reporting the discovery of mineralized rods and cones in a 300-million-year-old fossil fish found in Kansas. The soft tissues of the eye and brain decay rapidly after death, within 64 days and 11 days, respectively, and are almost never preserved in the fossil record — making this the first discovery of fossil rods and cones in general and the first evidence for color vision in a fossilized vertebrate eye.

Comments

Re:That's all well and good..

[Urkki]

...but was it 4K?

Well, I don't know about that, but at least it was better than Oculus Rift, if images in TFA are anything to go by. Something like semi-spherical 320 by 240 degrees with 3D zone of maybe 120 by 240 degrees in the middle, or thereabouts.

Also, it's not just the vision, the display system goes with lateral twin ultra low bass audio arrays, capable of generating fully spherical acoustic environment awareness experience.

the real mystery (to me)

[frovingslosh]

OK, early fish could see in colors. And clearly modern birds (and their dino ancestors) can see in color. There is strong observal evidence that amphibians can see in color too. So just how is it that virtually all mammals supposedly lost the ability to see in color (which itself is hard for me to buy) and yet then the apes evolved the ability to see in color again and they did it with the same rod and code mechanism that was used in the primitive fish. I'm hard pressed to believe that there is an advantage for colorblindness that would have been selected for in the earliest mammals.