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 ...

Scientists once thought that humans must have 2 million genes to account for all our complexity. But since sequencing the human genome, researchers have learned that humans only have about 19,000 to ...

Scientists have long puzzled over the gap in the fossil record that would explain the evolution from invertebrates to vertebrates. Vertebrates, including fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, ...

The cradle of vertebrate evolution was limited to a zone of shallow coastal waters, no more than 60 meters deep. In those waters, fish — the first vertebrates — appeared roughly 480 million years ago, ...

The vertebrate body plan emerged in concert with extensive changes to anterior chordate morphology, including assembly of a craniofacial skeleton, expansion of the anterior neuroepithelium into a ...

Learn how a second pair of eyes helped this 518-million-year-old fish evade predators. Spiders have eight eyes, bees have five, and boxed jellyfish have 24 — but these are the exceptions. The vast ...