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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Researchers at University of Tsukuba and their collaborators have conducted a comprehensive analysis of the olfactory receptor repertoire of the hagfish (Eptatretus burgeri), a jawless vertebrate.

Note to readers: In the scratch-and-sniff version of this article, you will smell rotting hagfish, dissected worm guts and a suitcase full of slime. Don't worry — you won't need a gas mask to read it.

The small teeth lining cichlid fishes’ throats won’t make it into any baby scrapbooks, but the nubs have helped researchers figure out how vertebrates got their chompers. Research has uncovered what ...

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 ...