brraaaaaiiiiinsssss

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Today I wrote an extremely teensy story for ScienceNOW. It’s at the bottom of this list. It’s about a 300-million-year-old fossil brain. That’s really old. Soft tissue doesn’t usually get preserved, but they found this one with the crazy bright x-rays of a synchrotron.

Those little teeny stories only run with one picture, so I’m really just blogging here to share this drawing of what the iniopterygian (it’s a cartilaginous fish, related to sharks and stuff) might have looked like:

iniopterygian

Is it just me, or does this fish look…well…kind of dumb? In a wide-eyed, hopeful way. Sorry bout the extinction, little guy.

Image courtesy of PNAS

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About Helen Fields

I'm a freelance writer living in Washington, D.C. I like to knit,sing, dance, and write about science. Only one of these pays the bills. A few years ago I spent six weeks on an icebreaker in the Bering Sea and two months in Berlin on a journalism fellowship, and who knows - I could find some more adventures sometime.