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 ...

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 ...

Researchers at University of Tsukuba and their collaborators have conducted a comprehensive analysis of the olfactory ...

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 ...

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 ...

New 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 important episode ...

Sequence comparisons of the three homologous polypeptide chains that compose vertebrate fibrinogens imply that the molecule evolved before the divergence of vertebrates and invertebrates, but, to our ...

What did the last common ancestor of the vertebrate animals—a very small, soft-bodied marine organism that lived about 600 million years ago—look like? While the portrait is still emerging, a new ...

A guest post from Katie Thomas, a graduate student at Duke University researching the evolution of bioluminescence in squids. (@katiethomas10) For those of us who love the spineless weirdoes of the ...

The design of a protected areas network that contains or represents as many species as possible (maximum complementarity of areas) is a first step toward in situ conservation of species biodiversity.