Five-hundred million years ago, it was relatively safe to go back in the water. That's because creatures of the deep had not yet evolved jaws. In a new pair of studies in eLife and Development, ...

Analysis of a 458-million-year-old fossil fish reveals anatomical insights about the vertebrate skull and how skull organization evolved from that of ancestral early vertebrates to that of jawed ...

Scarce evidence indicates that key evolutionary steps for jawed vertebrates occurred during or before the Silurian period, 444 million to 419 million years ago. Fossil finds pull back the curtain on ...

A stunningly-preserved, half-billion year old fossil of a strange Cambrian creature could shift our understanding of how a sister group to vertebrates evolved, a new study suggests. The fossil, ...

In the limestone ranges of Western Australia’s Kimberley region, near the town of Fitzroy Crossing, you’ll find one of the world’s best-preserved ancient reef complexes. Here lie the remnants of ...

Dedication to William Buckland / Christopher J. Duffin -- Introduction. Vertebrate coprolite studies : status and prospectus / Adrian P. Hunt ... [et al.] -- History of study. The earliest published ...

New research from the University of St Andrews has discovered a crucial piece in the puzzle of how all animals with a spine - including all mammals, fish, reptiles and amphibians - evolved. In a paper ...

Scientists discover missing evolution puzzle piece in 130-million-year-old rocks. The discovery is a result of an international collaboration, in which the Faculty of Sciences of the University of ...

Even Charles Darwin was puzzled by the evolution of the vertebrate eye. New research suggests that it traces back to a cyclopean invertebrate with a single eye atop the head. By Carl Zimmer Look at ...

There may be twice as many vertebrates on the planet as previous estimates claimed, according to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. That's ...