What did the very first complex vertebrate brain look like? To find out, scientists turned to an unlikely time traveler: the ...

Three species that lived about 308 million years ago challenge the idea that the first land vertebrates underwent ...

"It took 10 people over a week just to find this one tiny 10-millimeter adult." ...

Early vertebrates such as myllokunmingids were small and lacked effective defense mechanisms compared to the large predators ...

Pterosaurs, the first vertebrates to fly, would have had more diverse wing shapes than current scientific reconstructions ...

A new study constructs the first 3D single-cell brain atlas of the lamprey, uncovering the 450-million-year-old molecular blueprint of vertebrates.

A major fossil discovery in Canada sheds new light on the development of the earliest vertebrates, including the origin of jaws, the first time this feature has been seen so early in the fossil record ...

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 ...

When we consider the very beginnings of life on Earth, we might envision giant dinosaurs stomping through ancient forests, or ...

A simple physical mechanism that can be assimilated to folding, or buckling, means that an unformed mass of cells can change in a single step into an embryo organized as a typical vertebrate. Thanks ...

Hourglass treefrog (Dendropsophus ebraccatus). Amphibians, which face some of the steepest declines worldwide, saw some of the biggest benefits to living in protected lands. (Credit: Justin Nowakowski ...