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And speaking about eyes and lenses, exploring our world has allowed science to find out some fascinating things: palaeontology is a science that studies past, extinct animals and plants of all sorts, and leads us to surprising conclusions about the evolution of life. Recently, palaeontologist have found a remarkable fossil of a 'Phacops' trilobite, conserved with surprising detail.

Trilobites were ancient marine arthropods from which spiders and scorpions evolved; they became extinct at the end of the Permian period, about 245 million years ago. These animals had eyes similar to those of modern-day insects; these composite eyes are formed by a lot of individual, smaller and very simple eyes working together.

The way in which this particular trilobite specimen underwent fossilisation means that very minute details have been preserved.

So, in the massive, compound eyes of this animal, even the lenses - the crystalline found in our eyes - have been preserved, turned into transparent silica stone.

And this led to scientists to try something that eventually was a success: to try to look thorough the eyes of a trilobite, in order to find out how those animals saw the world, literally. So a special photo camera was adapted to use these ancient eyes as lenses, and a number of pictures have been taken; after hundreds of millions of years, the eyes of that trilobite became functional again.

This has been a truly remarkable occasion; such high-quality fossilisation is not unique, but quite uncommon and only under very special circumstances it can take place. In this case, silica replaced all the organic material in the eyes of the deceased animal fairly quickly, before decomposition. In some other cases - exceptional too -, even cell nuclei have been preserved.

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