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TPO36-1 The First Eye Putting a date on the first appearance of eyes depends on what one means by eye. If the term refers to a multicellular organ, even if it has just a few cells, then by definition, eyes could not form before there were multicellular animals. But many protists (animal-like, plantlike, or fungus-like unicellular organisms that require a water-based environment) can detect light by using aggregations of pigment molecules, and they use this information to modify their metabolic activity or motility (the ability to move spontaneously and independently). One of the familiar living examples, probably known to anyone who has taken a biology class, is the aquatic protozoan Euglena, which has an eyespot near its motile fIagellum (hairlike structure). Some living protists are very like their ancestral forms embedded in ancient sedimentary rocks, and this similarity suggests that the ability to detect light and modify behavior in response to light has been around for a very long time. Animals arose from one of such unicellular creatures, perhaps from one already specialized for a primitive kind of vision. An eye is a collection of cells that are specialized for light detection through the presence of photosensitive pigment as well as a means of restricting the direction of incoming light that will strike the photosensitive cells. This definition says nothing about image formation, lenses, eye movements, or any of the other features we associate with our own eyes, but it does recognize the simplest form of functional and anatomical specialisation namely, detection of light. Everything else can be built up from this simple beginning, and some animals appear to have had eyes almost from the beginning of the animal kingdom. Animals were scarce 600 million years ago in the geological era called the Precambrian. There are very few fossil remains from that time (though more keep turning up), and most evidence of the presence of animals is indirect, such as small tu