A stunningly preserved, soft-bodied fish that is more than 500 million years old could be the ancestor of almost all living vertebrates. The fossilized fish, called Metaspriggina, sports ...

Researchers recently discovered that the sea lamprey, a modern representative of ancient jawless vertebrates, fights invading pathogens by generating up to 100 trillion unique receptors. These ...

Individual Greenland sharks appear to live perhaps a century longer than any other vertebrate, and might have life spans approaching 500 years. By human standards, a few vertebrate species have ...

It may be a bias left over from the long time I've spent studying it, but the development of the vertebrate spinal column has always struck me as elegant. Two signaling centers on the top and bottom ...

As it turns out, the spineless and the brave stand up to adversity the same way. A key protein involved in animals’ physiological responses to stress has carried out the same function since before any ...

Researchers have elucidated the evolutionary origins of placodes and neural crests, which are defining features of vertebrates, through lineage tracing and genetic analysis in Ciona intestinalis, a ...

Lampreys, jawless fish closely related to the first vertebrates, possess 41 types of a little-known genetic regulator called microRNA. Some biologists say microRNA answers the mystery of how backbones ...

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 ...

Those of you who took high school biology may remember the lancelet, also known as the amphioxus. Its simplified body plan is notable for containing a number of features that it shares in common with ...