According to a new study it's likely that creatures venturing out of the depths viewed their new environment in full colour.
Lungfish were previously thought to have poor eyesight due to their small eyes, low spatial resolving power, sluggish behaviour in captivity and ability to detect prey using electroreception. N.forsteri inhabits a brightly lit, shallow freshwater habitat similar to the environment from which terrestrial evolution probably occurred. This prompted the team to investigate the complement of visual proteins expressed in N. forsteri, to trace photoreception's evolution in ancestral tetrapods.
"The genus Neoceratodus, of which N. forsteri is the sole survivor, is found in the fossil record from the Lower Cretaceous period 135 million years ago and therefore N. forsteri lays claim to being the oldest surviving vertebrate genus," says Bailes. "The visual system of N. forsteri may represent an evolutionary design most closely reflecting that present just prior to the emergence of land vertebrates in the Devonian period."