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 ...

The earliest ancestors of all backboned animals, including humans, may have viewed the world with four eyes, not just two.

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 ...

Parthenogenesis, a form of asexual reproduction in which an egg develops in the absence of fertilisation, has traditionally been associated with invertebrates. However, recent discoveries have ...

Scientists have uncovered an unexpected genetic shift that may explain how animals with backbones first emerged and became so diverse.

Fossils of the prehistoric fish genus myllokunmingiid, more than 518 million years old, reveal that early vertebrates may have had four functional eyes. Researchers found that two large lateral eyes ...

Learn how a second pair of eyes helped this 518-million-year-old fish evade predators.

Vertebrate morphology exhibits remarkable diversity, reflecting a complex interplay of developmental processes, genetic regulation and environmental pressures. This variation arises from a combination ...

A study published in Nature on July 4 by Prof. Zhu Bing from the Institute of Biophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has shed light on the conserved mechanism responsible for the initiation of ...

The study has revealed unexpected and sex-specific effects of germline regulation on longevity and somatic repair in vertebrates. Contrary to classical evolutionary theories, it turns out that ...