The study of early vertebrates provides an essential window into the evolutionary processes that shaped modern biodiversity. Fossil discoveries spanning the Silurian to Devonian periods reveal a ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. After an ancient extinction killed about 85% of marine species, survivors in isolated refuges helped jawed vertebrates diversify ...

Most people don’t think of turtles as being exceptionally chatty—or even making sounds at all. But research published today in Nature Communicationsreveals that at least 50 turtle species vocalize—and ...

Scientists have long puzzled over the gap in the fossil record that would explain the evolution of invertebrates to vertebrates. Vertebrates, including fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, ...

Vertebrates have extremely different brain sizes: even with the same body size, brain size can vary a hundredfold. As a rule, mammals and birds have the largest brains in relation to their body size, ...

Ancient fossils from South China reveal the earliest bony fishes and shed new light on how jaws, teeth, and key vertebrate ...

The coelacanth is known as a "living fossil" because its anatomy has changed little in the last 65 million years. Despite being one of the most studied fish in history, it continues to reveal new ...

“We found that cryptic species are consistently widespread and common across major vertebrate groups. In every major group of vertebrates, we estimated (on average) approximately two cryptic species ...

Direct survival benefits in larger groups rather than kin-selected indirect fitness primarily drive the evolution of division of labor in cooperatively breeding vertebrates, particularly under harsh ...

About 445 million years ago, Earth’s oceans turned into a danger zone. Glaciers spread across the supercontinent Gondwana, and shallow seas shrank fast. Ocean chemistry also shifted hard. In what ...