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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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Oct. 30 (UPI) --The population of the world's vertebrates -- including mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians -- has dropped 60 percent over the past 40 years and the rate of extinction is 100 ...

Using the largest and most informative molecular phylogenetic dataset ever analysed, evolutionary biologists were able to construct a new phylogenetic tree of jawed vertebrates. This new tree resolves ...

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 ...

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 ...