He took the abundance of sensory innervation (stimulate a nerve or muscle) to affirm his contention that the nose's touch must represent the moles dominant facial sense.
Roughly 130 years after Eimer's discovery, Catania and colleagues recorded in 2004 striking behavioural evidence in favour of his conclusions, using a high-speed camera.
Eimer saw two to three single nerve fibres, rising straight in the middle of the column and ending in the fifth layer under the stratum corneum that forms the hard top of the epidermis.
The authors published micrographs of the organ and its innervation, depicting Eimer's free-ending fibers as well as the Merkel cell-neurite complexes and the Vater-Pacini corpuscles.
These nerve fibres as well as the Merkel cell-neurite complexes are known to respond to local touches with great sensitivity, whereas the Vater-Pacini corpuscles are highly tuned to the frequencies of dispersed vibrations.
The follicles of whiskers, also known as vibrissae or sinus hairs, and the push rods in monotremes, as published by Proske et al., represent the only other known discrete structures in the skin that combine three mechanoreceptor types.
Catania and Kaas have shown that the nose of the star-nosed mole is mapped in multiple topographic representations on an extraordinarily large swath of cerebral cortex that processes touch.
This topographic morphological representation of the sensory periphery is similar to that of the facial whiskers by cytoarchitectonic modules called barrels in the rodent cerebral cortex.