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 ...

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 ...

A few strange pits and trails preserved in ancient Italian rocks have changed what scientists thought they knew about the ...

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

A research team at Yunnan University has resolved a longstanding mystery regarding Earth’s earliest vertebrates, revealing ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...