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 ...

Evidence for the early evolution of our skeletons can be found in a group of fossil fishes called heterostracans, which lived over 400 million years ago. These fishes include some of the oldest ...

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 ...

which are some of the earliest vertebrates (animals with backbones) in which the mouth is fossilized. Their aim was to answer questions about feeding in early vertebrates without jaws in the early ...

Height map of the rock slab above, preserving the earliest evidence for deep-sea vertebrates. Color coding is related to height, with the warmer colours at the higher elevations.