In September 2013 scientists announced they think they’ve found a fossil of the first animal with what might be recognized as a face. This 419-million-year-old fish fossil found in China isn't much to look at. But look closely. You may be able to make out the animal’s jutting jawbones, slit nostrils, and tiny eye sockets. Scientists say those features are what make the fish so remarkable: They think its the oldest known creature with a face.
The fish has been named Entelognathus primordialis. Its unique fossil could be the key to explaining how many modern-day animals—including humans—came to look the way they do.
Until now scientists held the belief that a category of swimmers called "bony fish" evolved over hundreds of millions of years to give rise to all modern land-dwelling vertebrates—animals with a backbone—like reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals.
E. primordialis belongs to a much older group of fish called the placoderms. They had a skeleton made mostly of a flexible tissue called cartilage and were covered in bony plates of armor. They also had the first simple beak-like jaws.
Scientists believed placoderms and bony fish were unrelated. But E. primordialis’s fossil may turn this idea on its head and shake up the current fish family tree. Scientists studying E. primordialis’s fossil found that the fish was about 20 centimeters (8 inches) long. It had no teeth, tiny eyes set inside what looked like large "bony goggles," a scaly tail, and a heavily armored body. For the most part it looked like a prehistoric placoderm. That is, until they inspected its facial bones. They surprisingly looked a lot like those of bony fish. The discovery could mean that placoderms and bony fish were in fact related.
Other land vertebrates also have E. primordialis’s arrangement of bones in their face, which include smaller bones that make up the upper jaw, a lower jawbone, and cheekbones. That’s led scientists to suggest that the fish may be the great, great, great, great relative of all vertebrates.
