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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A fossil creature from the Devonian discovered more recently has been hailed as a vital link between fish and the first vertebrates to walk on land. Found in the Canadian Arctic in 2004 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Most living vertebrates also possess jaws, teeth and paired fins or limbs. Fossils of the earliest vertebrates help us understand not only how these features originated, but also how they evolved ...

ScientiFix, our weekly feature, offers you a summary of the top global science stories of the week, with links to their ...

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.