1st fossilized heart in prehistoric animal found in Brazil

A new discovery, announced on 22nd April 2016 in the journal eLife, shows the perfectly preserved 3D fossilised heart in a 113-119 million-year-old fish from Brazil called Rhacolepis.
This is the first definite fossilised heart found in any prehistoric animal.
•    Certain rare fossil deposits, called konservat laggerstätten (meaning "place of storage"), are formed by rapid burial under special chemical conditions. These deposits can preserve a range of soft tissues from the organism.
•    The first fossilized heart ever found in a prehistoric animal
•    The fish Rhacolepis imaged by synchrotron tomography showing the heart (left) and a cross-section through the heart showing valves (right, white arrows). Credit: Maldanis et al. (2016)
•    The famous Burgess Shale fossils from British Columbia in Canada show soft-bodied worms and other invertebrate creatures. These were buried by rapid mudslides around 525 million years ago.
•    The well-preserved fishes from the 113-119 million-year-old Santana Formation of Brazil were among the first vertebrate fossils to show evidence of preserved soft tissues. These include parts of stomachs and bands of muscles.
•    The discovery of complete soft tissues preserved as whole internal organs in a fossil was a bit of a Holy Grail for palaeontologists. Such finds could contribute to understanding deeper evolutionary patterns as internal soft organs have their own set of specialised features.
•    Finding a complete fossilised heart in a fish almost 120 million years old was a major breakthrough for José Xavier-Neto of the Brazilian Biosciences National Laboratory, Lara Maldanis of the University of Campinas, Vincent Fernandez of the European Synchotron Radiation Facility and colleagues from across Brazil and Sweden.
•    Back in 2000, a group of US scientists claimed to have found a heart preserved in a dinosaur nicknamed Willo, a Thescelosaurus. But recent work has debunked this claim, showing the cavity of the dinosaur body was infilled by sediment and then impregnated with iron-rich minerals to make the cavity inside look a bit heart-like when imaged by CT scanning.