  We study the evolution of curvature perturbations and the cosmic microwave
background (CMB) power spectrum in the presence of an hypothesized extra
anisotropic stress which might arise, for example, from the dark radiation term
in brane-world cosmology. We evolve the scalar modes of such perturbations
before and after neutrino decoupling and analyze their effects on the CMB
spectrum. A novel result of this work is that the cancellation of the neutrino
and extra anisotropic stress could lead to a spectrum of residual curvature
perturbations which is similar to the observed CMB power spectrum. This implies
a possible additional consideration in the determination of cosmological
parameters from the CMB analysis.
