380m-year-old fish fossils help understand evolution of abs - Times of India

LONDON: The incredibly wellpreserved musculature of a 380-million-year-old fish could help explain how the modernday six-pack abs — the pride of films stars like Salman Khan and Arnold Schwarzenegger — evolved. Swedish, Australian and French researchers have unveiled the preserved musculature of the 380-million-year-old armoured fish discovered in Australia. Their research will help scientists to better understand how neck and abdominal muscles evolved during the transition from jawless to jawed vertebrates. A few years ago, an Australian research team made the discovery that fossils found in the Gogo Formation , a sedimentary rock formation in Australia, also contained soft tissues, including nerve and muscle cells. These fossils were of the placoderms , an extinct group that includes some of the earliest jawed fish. The team has now collaborated with researchers from Sweden's Uppsala University and with the European Synchrotron (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, to document and reconstruct the musculature of the placoderms. "High contrast X-ray images were produced using a powerful beam and a protocol developed for fossil imaging at the ESRF," said Sophie Sanchez , one of the study authors. These early vertebrates were found to to have well-developed neck muscles and powerful abdominal muscles — not unlike the abs sported by men today. "This shows that vertebrates developed a sophisticated musculature much earlier than we had thought," said study co-author Per Ahlberg. via Science - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNGceCdWw5IGj7KVtmVYPQnyyw6Z0A&url=http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/380m-year-old-fish-fossils-help-understand-evolution-of-abs/articleshow/20599262.cms

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