We may earn commission if you buy from a link. For example, typical dinosaur fossils are bones turned to stone and preserved from the passage of time located, if we're particularly lucky, in large collections that can be reassembled to represent the beast they used to prop up in their entirety. Some are just impressions of small creatures or animals left in rocks, but most have something in common—it's just the hard stuff left behind. With the exception of those found in environments particularly adept at preservation, the soft tissues degrade over time and all we're left with is stony bone. “It's always interesting to see what's inside a sample using 3D imaging,” Katherine Dobson, one of the co-authors of a study centered on this remarkable find, said in a press release, “but in this incredible tiny larva, natural fossilization has achieved almost perfect preservation.” That “almost perfect preservation” made the specimen an absolute gold mine for evolutionary biologists. That detail also allowed scientists to draw evolutionary connections between the critters of the ancient past and those scuttling around today. Now that scientists have seen it, they can see that it evolved into the “nub” of arthropod heads that has allowed them to thrive in such a wide variety of environments—from the depths of the ocean to every single continent on Earth (yes, including Antarctica). “When I used to daydream about the one fossil I'd most like to discover,” Martin Smith, the lead researcher on the study, said in a press release, “I'd always be thinking of an arthropod larva, because developmental data are just so central to understanding their evolution. I already knew that this simple worm-like fossil was something special, but when I saw the amazing structures preserved under its skin, my jaw just dropped—how could these intricate features have avoided decay and still be here to see half a billion years later?” Right now, the scientists are happily counting themselves lucky that the creature was preserved at all, giving us a unique window into what life looked like in our distant past. This “Battery In a Rock” Changes the Energy Game This Dark Ocean Pit Has a Bleak Weather Forecast A DNA Mutation Helps Some Fish Survive Deep Waters This Bizarre Fossil Is a Whole New Form of Life Are There More Humans on Earth Than We Thought?