ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Massive increase in visual range preceded the origin of terrestrial vertebrates.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers.
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45 citing papers in PubMed, 106 citations in OpenAlex.
- Cell-type Plasticity Supports Behavioral Adaptations at the Water-to-Land Interface.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Opsin gene evolution in aquatic, amphibious and terrestrial blennies (Blenniidae).Biology open · 2026Article
- From peripersonal space to cognitive maps: An evolutionary perspective.Progress in neurobiology · 2026Review
- Sound reasons for tympanic hearing in mammalian precursors.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Fish alter locomotor and feeding kinematics to capture aerial prey.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Digital volumetric modeling reveals unique body plan experimentation in the Devonian tetrapodiScience · 2025Article
- Will I stay or will I go? Eye morphology predicts individual migratory propensity in a partial migrant.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- Making sense of vertebrate senses from a neural crest and cranial placode evo-devo perspective.Trends in neurosciences · 2025Review
- Multiple Pathways of Visual Adaptations for Water Column Usage in an Antarctic Adaptive Radiation.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Environmental complexity modulates information processing and the balance between decision-making systems.Neuron · 2024Article
- A short natural history of mental time travels: a journey still travelled?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- From water to land: Evolution of photoreceptor circuits for vision in air.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- The origin of blinking in both mudskippers and tetrapods is linked to life on land.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Ecomorphological patterns in trigeminal canal branching among sauropsids reveal sensory shift in suchians.Journal of anatomy · 2023Article
- Review
- Complementary feedback control enables effective gaze stabilization in animals.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- The neuroecology of the water-to-land transition and the evolution of the vertebrate brain.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Evolution of behavioural control from chordates to primates.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Neuroscience needs evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Integrated world modeling theory expanded: Implications for the future of consciousness.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The evolution of terrestrial vertebrates, starting around 385 million years ago, is an iconic moment in evolution that brings to mind images of fish transforming into four-legged animals. Here, we show that this radical change in body shape was preceded by an equally dramatic change in sensory abilities akin to transitioning from seeing over short distances in a dense fog to seeing over long distances on a clear day. Measurements of eye sockets and simulations of their evolution show that eyes nearly tripled in size just before vertebrates began living on land. Computational simulations of these animal's visual ecology show that for viewing objects through water, the increase in eye size provided a negligible increase in performance. However, when viewing objects through air, the increase in eye size provided a large increase in performance. The jump in eye size was, therefore, unlikely to have arisen for seeing through water and instead points to an unexpected hybrid of seeing through air while still primarily inhabiting water. Our results and several anatomical innovations arising at the same time suggest lifestyle similarity to crocodiles. The consequent combination of the increase in eye size and vision through air would have conferred a 1 million-fold increase in the amount of space within which objects could be seen. The "buena vista" hypothesis that our data suggest is that seeing opportunities from afar played a role in the subsequent evolution of fully terrestrial limbs as well as the emergence of elaborated action sequences through planning circuits in the nervous system.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.