Now, research by Jiang and his colleagues published today (July 7) in Science concludes that yunnanozoans may be among the earliest vertebrates. Vertebrates are thought to have emerged during the ...

A rice farm in southern Brazil was just found to be home to the fossil of one of the missing links between the ground-based ...

And since placodes buzz with genes that also sculpt teeth and fish scales, some scientists think that placodes arose in the earliest vertebrates—a “remarkable conservatism,” argues ...

One of the first vertebrates that may have ventured onto land, whose remains date from about 364 million years ago, is called Ichthyostega. Although fishlike in many ways, it had robust bony legs ...