Over the past 530 million years, the vertebrate lineage branched out from a primitive jawless fish wriggling through Cambrian seas to encompass all the diverse forms of fish, birds, reptiles, ...

Biologists have considered nearly every major taxon of animals as the key starting point for the evolution of vertebrates. We survey these ideas, many of which are no longer tenable in the light of ...

Researchers have elucidated the evolutionary origins of placodes and neural crests, which are defining features of vertebrates, through lineage tracing and genetic analysis in Ciona intestinalis, a ...

The findings suggest that the appearance of the vertebrate head skeleton ‘did not depend on evolution of a new skeletal tissue, as is commonly thought, but on the spread of this tissue throughout the ...

To celebrate the golden jubilee of On the Origin of Species, in 1909, the Linnean Society of London held a special meeting on a hot biological topic of the day — the origin of the vertebrates. Such ...

The fossil of an ancient sea squirt found in a collection at the Utah Museum of Natural History turned out to be the oldest of its kind. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an ...

An amphioxus in the Daniel Medeiros lab is seen with most of its body burrowed into sand and its mouth exposed, as it waits for food to drift by. Photo by David Jandzik. The findings suggest that the ...