Over the past 530 million years, the vertebrate lineage branched out from a primitive jawless fish wriggling through Cambrian seas to encompass all the diverse forms of fish, birds, reptiles, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Although less familiar as flower visitors than insect pollinators, vertebrate pollinators are more likely to have coevolved tight relationships of high value to the plants they service, supplying ...

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 ...

The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) was founded in 1940 for individuals with an interest in vertebrate paleontology. SVP (as it is known to its members) now has almost 2,000 members. The ...

The sea lamprey, a 500-million-year-old animal with a sharp-toothed suction cup for a mouth, is the thing of nightmares. A new study from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research discovered that the ...

What are ammonites, and how did they come to rule the prehistoric seas? What are ammonites, and how did they come to rule the prehistoric seas? Invertebrates are animals without a backbone or bony ...

Humans have a ''disproportionately huge effect'' on the other species of vertebrates that share Earth's surface with us, causing more than 25 percent of the deaths among an array of species all over ...

Animal testing has become a questionably effective thorn in the side of scientific progress. While it was once our best method, alternative methods are beginning to surpass animal testing in both ...

Bees are not the only animals that carry pollen from flower to flower. Species with backbones, among them bats, birds, mice, and even lizards, also serve as pollinators. Although less familiar as ...