Research has demonstrated that the blind human who lost vision early in his life uses his occipital cortex, normally visual, for auditory and somatosensory tasks (Leclerc et al., Neuroreport, 2000, 11-3:545; Sadato et al., Nature, 1996,380-6574 :526). Some degree of cross-modal plasticity has also been shown in blind rodents such as the mole rat (Bronchti et al., Eur.J.Neurosci., 2002, 16:311), the neonatally enucleated hamster (Izraeli et al., Eur.J.Neurosci., 2002,15:693) and the anophthalmic ZRDCT/An mouse (Robert et al., 33rd SFN, 2003, 266.3). In all these models, auditory inputs to the visual dorso-lateral geniculate nucleus (LGNd) in the thalamus originated from the inferior colliculus (IC). The aim of this study is to investigate when these ectopic connections between the auditory brainstem and the visual thalamus develop in the neonatal anophthalmic mouse. To achieve this, we used paraformaldehyde fixed brains of anophthalmic newborn mice aged from 5 to 12 days old where lipophilic fluorescent cry...