What did the very first complex vertebrate brain look like? To find out, scientists turned to an unlikely time traveler: the lamprey, a jawless, eel-like fish whose body plan has barely changed in ...

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 ...

Researchers from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) and Kiel University (CAU) have examined immune system function in ...

The origin of all living vertebrates just got more mysterious. Since the 1970s, many evolutionary biologists have considered an eel-like, deep-sea-dwelling creature called the hagfish to be the ...

Within every muscle of every living species with a backbone, a protein called myosin tugs on a partner protein to generate a ...

Learn how increased protein diversity in signaling genes may have helped drive the shift from invertebrates to vertebrates, reshaping how animals with a spine evolved. From frogs and fish to birds and ...

Movement defines life across the animal kingdom. From a fish cutting through water to a bird taking flight, muscles power ...

The neural crest is characterized by its origin in the CNS, its migratory behaviour and its ability to differentiate into many cell types (multipotency). Although all animals of the chordate phylum, ...

Placodes and neural crests are defining features of vertebrates (animals with a spinal cord surrounded by cartilage or bone). Placodes are embryonic structures that develop into sensory organs such as ...

New research finds that the traits that make vertebrates distinct from invertebrates were made possible by the emergence of a new set of genes 500 million years ago, documenting an important episode ...

Biologists have considered nearly every major taxon of animals as the key starting point for the evolution of vertebrates. We survey these ideas, many of which are no longer tenable in the light of ...

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 ...