Henry Gee

Now, if you want to go and discover new faunas for things, go to China.

It's just amazing.

So in southern China was the Chengjiang fauna and their other sins.

The Chengjiang fauna is older than the Burgess Shales by a few million years.

And that included lots of similar things to the Burgess shells, but the other ones, Fuchsia Nuer, I apologise, I don't know how to pronounce it either.

Now, some of these are preserved so beautifully that you can even see the nervous systems.

Wow, that's emotional.

Yeah, you can reconstruct the nervous systems of Fuchsia and Huya to see how their brains were similar or different from modern arthropods, and you get an idea.

Now, this is quite important for anatomy geeks because students of insects and arthropods are perplexed by what's known as the arthropod head problem.

Now, arthropods are segmented animals.

and nobody's quite sure how many of the original segments went to make the head.

Now, this is a problem that perplexed people back to Goethe.

But once you've got the nervous system inside as well as the segments on the outside, you can get a better idea.

I think people are made inroads into the arthropod head problem, but I sincerely hope they never solve it because it's a wonderful problem.

It's a nice problem to have.

Vertebrates are the animals, the group of animals to which we belong.

These are animals with backbones.

So rather than have an external hard skeleton like the arthropods and invertebrates, vertebrates have an internal skeleton, the backbone.

Now, the origin of vertebrates is a subject that is close to my heart because when I was a graduate student in Cambridge, I had to teach early vertebrate history to undergraduates.

Now, in Oxford and Cambridge, most of the actual teaching is given to the graduate students.