Imagine a world where the boundaries between “fish” and “not-fish” blur, where the ancestors of birds and mammals once swam ...

He doesn't even have a head. If Blob had been born with a spine, or backbone, he would have been a vertebrate. If we give Blob some legs and a head then he can start to move about. There are lots ...

This story appears in the October 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine. From scales to feathers to fur, vertebrates clothe themselves in a dazzling variety of textures and hues. But ...

A fossil analysis suggests that the yunnanozoan, a wormlike fish that flourished around 520 million years ago, sported structures that were the precursors of the head and jaws of modern vertebrates.

How the developmental program has evolved to generate the impressive morphological diversity of organs and tissues across vertebrates ? What are the relationships between form and function of ...

In vertebrates, the skeleton of different regions of the body arises from different precursor cells. Researchers have now discovered that these skeletal cells do not just differ in their ...

T he Greenland shark holds the title as the longest-lived vertebrate on Earth, with some individuals potentially reaching 500 years of age. This elusive deep-sea predator, found in the frigid ...

Model vertebrates are extensively studied non-human vertebrates (species with a notochord, or vertebral column) chosen for the ease of investigating particular biological phenomena in areas such ...