Scientists have uncovered an unexpected genetic shift that may explain how animals with backbones first emerged and became so diverse.

Learn how increased protein diversity in signaling genes may have helped drive the shift from invertebrates to vertebrates, ...

A 400-million-year-old jawed fish fossil found in the Arctic, Romundina gagnieri, could be a key link in the evolution of ...

Life on our home planet dates back to hundreds of millions of years before the arrival of the dinosaurs. Among the most ...

New research from the University of St Andrews has discovered a crucial piece in the puzzle of how all animals with a ...

The study of early vertebrates provides an essential window into the evolutionary processes that shaped modern biodiversity. Fossil discoveries spanning the Silurian to Devonian periods reveal a ...

Vertebrate morphology exhibits remarkable diversity, reflecting a complex interplay of developmental processes, genetic regulation and environmental pressures. This variation arises from a combination ...

A fish thought to be evolution’s time capsule just surprised scientists. A detailed dissection of the coelacanth — a 400-million-year-old species often called a “living fossil” — revealed that key ...

Scientists analyzing 443-million-year-old Scottish fossils have uncovered the early evidence that some of the first groups of vertebrates possessed surprisingly advanced eyes and traces of bone, ...

About 445 million years ago, Earth’s oceans turned into a danger zone. Glaciers spread across the supercontinent Gondwana, and shallow seas shrank fast.

The conservation of genome regulatory elements over long periods of evolution is not limited to vertebrates, as previously thought, but also in echinoderms (invertebrates). This is one of the most ...

Tidal marshes : home for the few and the highly selected / Russell Greenberg -- The Quaternary geography and biogeography of tidal saltmarshes / Karl P. Malamud-Roam [and others] -- Diversity and ...