Lamprey—slimy, eel-like parasitic fish with tooth-riddled, jawless sucking mouths—are rather disgusting to look at, but thanks to their important position on the vertebrate family tree, they can offer important insights ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 17, 2014
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If you never understood what "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" meant in high school, don't worry: biologists no longer think that an animal's "ontogeny", that is, its embryonic development, replays its entire evolutionary ...
Biotechnology
Sep 14, 2014
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We humans use the euphemism for sex that "we like to get a leg over" but the first jawed vertebrates – the placoderms – they liked to get a leg in.
Evolution
Jun 9, 2014
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It's difficult to identify a single evolutionary novelty in the animal kingdom that has fascinated and intrigued mankind more than the lantern of the firefly. Yet to this day, nothing has been known about the genetic foundation ...
Biotechnology
Mar 19, 2014
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According to the '2R hypothesis', the evolution of modern vertebrates was propelled forward in part by two events in our early ancestry in which the entire genome was duplicated. These events, known as 1R and 2R, yielded ...
Biotechnology
Feb 12, 2014
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Hox genes are the master regulators of embryonic development for all animals, including humans, flies and worms. They decide what body parts go where. Not surprisingly, if something goes wrong with these genes, the results ...
Biotechnology
Sep 13, 2013
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Architect genes are responsible for organizing structures of the body during embryonic development. Some of them, namely the Hox genes, are involved in the formation of forelimbs. They are activated in two successive waves, ...
Biotechnology
Jun 6, 2013
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(Phys.org) —A fundamental question in the evolution of animal body plans, is where did the head come from? In animals with a clear axis of right-left symmetry, the bilaterians, the head is where the brain is, at the anterior ...
Researchers have provided a glimpse at genetic expression in long-extinct fossil dinosaurs. This new insight comes from the discovery of a correlation between the genetic patterning observed in today's chickens and crocodiles, ...
Biotechnology
Oct 23, 2012
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The American paddlefish -- known for its bizarre, protruding snout and eggs harvested for caviar -- duplicated its entire genome about 42 million years ago, according to a new study published in the journal Genome Biology ...
Biotechnology
Aug 7, 2012
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