Professor Lars Schmitz joins WIRED to guide us through a giant tree of life mapping the evolution of eyes in the animal ...

Mantis shrimps probably have the most sophisticated vision in the animal kingdom. Their compound eyes move independently and they have 12 to 16 visual pigments compared to our three. They are the only ...

Compound eyes evolved rapidly during the Cambrian ... vision proper and when bundles of photoreceptors become bona fide eyes. Animals with stage-three eyes can find suitable homes, as sea stars ...

Its eyes are actually made up of thousands of tiny different lenses. We call this kind of eye a compound eye, and because all the little lenses point in different directions, animals that have ...

Compound eye of Telephina convexa, showing lots of tiny square lenses. This trilobite swam in oceans around 450 million years ago. Enlarged eyes let in more light and provided wrap-around vision. So ...

Horseshoe crabs also have 10 eyes—a pair of compound eyes on the front shell ... which looks like a big stinger but is used to help these animals flip if overturned and acts as a rudder as ...

Trilobites went down a slightly different route, evolving compound eyes with multiple lenses. But the basic sequence of events was the same. Trilobites weren’t the only animals to stumble across ...