Eye socket anatomy In addition to the globe (the eyeball), the eye socket contains blood vessels, nerves, muscles and fat. It's made up of seven orbital bones: frontal, sphenoid, zygomatic, maxillary, lacrimal, ethmoid and palatine. Together, they form a cone-like shape that opens outward.
In a paper published online Thursday in the journal Science, researchers report that they deduced dinosaur eye structure from the size and shape of the eye socket and of the scleral ring, a bone that sits inside the white of the eye of dinosaurs, birds and lizards.
They are believed to have a role in supporting the eye, especially in animals whose eyes are not spherical, or which live underwater. Fossil sclerotic rings are known for a variety of extinct animals, including ichthyosaurs, pterosaurs, and dinosaurs, but are often not preserved.
This bone like the Sclerotic ring that can still be found in living animals and fish serve the same purpose, to give support to the eyeball whether it is spherical or oblong. Without the support these bones give the eye would be free floating making for a very unusual look at the world.
The eye is made up of three coats, which enclose the optically clear aqueous humour, lens, and vitreous body. The outermost coat consists of the cornea and the sclera; the middle coat contains the main blood supply to the eye and consists, from the back forward, of the choroid, the ciliary body, and the iris.
Bones of the orbit
The bony orbit is made out of seven bones, which include the maxilla, zygomatic bone, frontal bone, ethmoid bone, lacrimal bone, sphenoid bone and palatine bone. The orbit appears as a pyramid, with its base opening anteriorly onto the face, while the apex is pointed posteromedially.
That the ocular skeleton (ossicles and cartilage) provides structural support to the delicate sensory structures of the eye is undisputed.
Seven bones form each orbit: frontal, sphenoid, maxillary, zygomatic, palatine, ethmoid, and lacrimal.
Your eyes are organs that allow you to see. Many parts of your eye work together to bring objects into focus and send visual information to your brain.
The femur is one of the most well-described bones of the human skeleton in fields ranging from clinical anatomy to forensic medicine. Because it is the longest and strongest bone in the human body, and thus, one of the most well-preserved in skeletal remains, it makes the greatest contribution to archaeology.
Sclerotic rings are a bony structure found surrounding the eyeball of many vertebrates, such as fish and birds. Since vision is so important to birds from finding food to watching for predators, or being able to judge distance for a smooth landing, having this bony ring keeps their vision as sharp as possible.
The space within the skull that contains the eye, including its nerves and muscles. The eye socket also includes the eyelids and the glands that make tears. It is made up of seven bones that surround and protect the eye.
Eye color is directly related to the amount of melanin in the front layers of the iris. People with brown eyes have a large amount of melanin in the iris, while people with blue eyes have much less of this pigment.
Scientists think the earliest version of the eye was formed in unicellular organisms, who had something called 'eyespots'. These eyespots were made up of patches of photoreceptor proteins that were sensitive to light. They couldn't see shapes or colour, but were able to determine whether it was light or dark out.
An “exceptional” 530 million-year-old fossil contains what could be the oldest eye ever discovered, according to researchers.
If we are thinking about human or vertebrate eyes, one would not expect that they could ever be fossilized. But part of eyes of the trilobites, like the rest of the exoskeleton, were made of calcite. They eyes of trilobites are compound like those of insects, crabs, and lobsters.
Bones, teeth, shells, and other hard body parts can be fairly easily preserved as fossils. However, they might become broken, worn, or even dissolved before they are buried by sediment. The soft bodies of organisms, on the other hand, are relatively hard to preserve.
This provides predators with greater depth-perception for pouncing on food, and gives prey a wider view of the landscape to survey the many dangers that may lurk just beyond their view.
Based on an analysis of 410 fossilized reptile specimens from the Mesozoic period (252 to 66 million years ago), a scientist concluded that T. rex and other flesh-eaters of similar ilk evolved smaller, narrower eyes over time, likely to compensate for their bites becoming more and more forceful.
Scientists have long known that T. rex ate bones, as indicated by the fragments found in fossilized dinosaur dung. Bones, particularly the yolk-like marrow inside, are rich in nutrients.
The first eyes appeared about 541 million years ago – at the very beginning of the Cambrian period when complex multicellular life really took off – in a group of now extinct animals called trilobites which looked a bit like large marine woodlice. Their eyes were compound, similar to those of modern insects.
While most of these creatures had circular eye sockets, large predators such as T. rex had a wider variety of eye shapes, including elliptical, keyhole or figure-of-eight sockets, which would've cushioned the impact of their bite as they captured and chewed their prey.
“We found very convincing evidence that some non-bird dinosaurs could see well in the dark, and that one dinosaur, Shuvuuia deserti, combined night vision with superb hearing”, says Choiniere.
The vitreous is the gel-like fluid that fills your eye. It's full of tiny fibers that attach to your retina (the light-sensitive layer of tissue at the back of the eye).