A new study constructs the first 3D single-cell brain atlas of the lamprey, uncovering the 450-million-year-old molecular blueprint of vertebrates.

Three species that lived about 308 million years ago challenge the idea that the first land vertebrates underwent ...

"It took 10 people over a week just to find this one tiny 10-millimeter adult." ...

Pterosaurs, the first vertebrates to fly, would have had more diverse wing shapes than current scientific reconstructions ...

Millipedes may have been crawling across Earth's landscapes nearly 460 million years ago, long before vertebrates ventured ...

Early vertebrates such as myllokunmingids were small and lacked effective defense mechanisms compared to the large predators ...

A major fossil discovery in Canada sheds new light on the development of the earliest vertebrates, including the origin of jaws, the first time this feature has been seen so early in the fossil record ...

Scientists once thought that humans must have 2 million genes to account for all our complexity. But since sequencing the human genome, researchers have learned that humans only have about 19,000 to ...

Scientists have long puzzled over the gap in the fossil record that would explain the evolution of invertebrates to vertebrates. Vertebrates, including fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, ...

New CU Boulder-led research finds that the traits that make vertebrates distinct from invertebrates were made possible by the emergence of a new set of genes 500 million years ago, documenting an ...

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 ...

Because we’re a member of the group, it’s easy to see vertebrates as the pinnacle of evolution, a group capable of producing bats, birds, and giant whales in addition to ourselves. But when they first ...