Ancient fossils from South China reveal the earliest bony fishes and shed new light on how jaws, teeth, and key vertebrate features evolved before the major fish lineages diverged.

The water-to-land transition stands as one of the most significant events in vertebrate evolution, giving rise to the two ...

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, ...

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 ...

A newly discovered fossil "treasure hoard" dating back some 436 million years to the early Silurian period reveals, for the first time, the complete body shape and form of some of the first jawed ...

There is considerable interest in understanding how vision and image-forming eyes evolved, and scientists tend to take it for granted that most vertebrates have two eyes. Writing in Nature, Lei et al.

Charles Darwin proposed that evolution is driven by gradual variations in organisms that have a survival advantage in a changing environment. But University of Maryland evolutionary biologist Karen ...