When two animals look the same, eat the same, behave the same way, and live in similar environments, one might expect that they belong to the same species.
The origin of the vertebrate skull is a topic of much debate among evolutionary biologists. Some believe that the vertebrate head has developed as a result of modification of the segmental elements of the trunk, such as the ...
Exceptionally well-preserved fossils from the Cambrian period have helped fill a gap in our understanding of the origin and evolution of major animal groups alive today.
One of the most basic and crucial embryonic processes to unfold in virtually every living organism is the formation of hollow, tubular structures of various kinds. These tubes may form blood vessels or a digestive tract, ...
For more than half a century, the Tully monster (Tullimonstrum gregarium), an enigmatic animal that lived about 300 million years ago, has confounded paleontologists, with its strange anatomy making it difficult to classify. ...
Life began on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, but the history of humans and other vertebrates accounts for only a fraction of this timescale. Chordates (a group that includes vertebrates) and echinoderms (like starfish ...
Many of us are returning to work or school after spending time with relatives over the summer period. Sometimes we can be left wondering how on earth we are related to some of these people with whom we seemingly have nothing ...
A tiny marine creature with a strange lifestyle may provide valuable insights into human neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease, according to scientists at Stanford Medicine.
Scientists have long puzzled over the gap in the fossil record that would explain the evolution from invertebrates to vertebrates. Vertebrates, including fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, and humans, share unique ...
Vertebrate evolution was accompanied by two rounds of whole genome duplication followed by functional divergence in terms of regulatory circuits and gene expression patterns. As a basal and slow-evolving chordate species, ...
