A new Nature Communications paper has journeyed to the inside of our insides, as a team from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University has mapped the evolutionary journey of how animal guts have ...
Placodes and neural crests are defining features of vertebrates (animals with a spinal cord surrounded by cartilage or bone). Placodes are embryonic structures that develop into sensory organs such as ear, nose, and lens ...
In molecular biology, retinoic acid plays a key role in signalling pathways in the embryonic development of vertebrates. However, not much is known about its origins in the metazoan evolution. An international team has described ...
A new high-definition genome sequence of the sea cucumber provides molecular insights into its ability to regenerate, according to a new study publishing 12 October in the open access journal PLOS Biology by Xiaojun Zhang, ...
A study recently published in PLOS Biology provides information that substantially changes the prevailing idea about the brain formation process in vertebrates and sheds some light on how it might have evolved.
Last year, headlines in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Scientific American and other outlets declared that a decades-old paleontological mystery had been solved. The "Tully monster," an ancient animal that had long defied ...
A new study by University of Arizona biologists helps explain why different groups of animals differ dramatically in their number of species, and how this is related to differences in their body forms and ways of life.
The transfer of genes from one organism to another is potentially a rapid way for evolution to occur and for complicated novel functions to emerge. However, even when the two organisms in question are in close proximity to ...
What if humans could regrow an amputated arm or leg, or completely restore nervous system function after a spinal cord injury?
Speculating about what aliens look like has kept children, film producers and scientists amused for decades. If they exist, will extra terrestrials turn out to look similar to us, or might they take a form beyond our wildest ...
