A study of fossilized lampreys dating from more than 300 million years ago is challenging a long-held theory about the evolutionary origin of vertebrates. These ancient, jawless, eel-like fishes arose ...

Lancelets, or amphioxus, are small worm-like marine animals that spend most of their lives buried in the sea floor, filter-feeding through jawless, ciliated mouths. The vertebrate affinities of these ...

Whole-genome duplications are rare evolutionary events in which all the chromosomes and genes of a species are doubled. This supplies new genetic material to the gene pool and can provide an ...

A new study, led by the University of Vienna and the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, shows how the eyes of adult marine bristleworms continue to grow throughout life – driven by a ring of ...

"In vertebrate examples of life-long growth as fishes and amphibians – such stem cells supply the eye with fresh retinal neurons while the animal develops," explains senior author Florian Raible, ...

A new study, led by the University of Vienna and the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, shows how the eyes of adult marine bristleworms continue to grow throughout life—driven by a ring of ...

Go back far enough in our history–maybe about 650 million years–and you come to a time when our ancestors were still invertebrates. That is, they had no skulls, teeth, or other bones. They didn’t even ...