For more than half a century, the Tully monster (Tullimonstrum gregarium), an enigmatic animal that lived about 300 million years ago, has confounded paleontologists, with its strange anatomy making ...

Five-hundred million years ago, it was relatively safe to go back in the water. That's because creatures of the deep had not yet evolved jaws. In a new pair of studies in eLife and Development, ...

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, ...

Scarce evidence indicates that key evolutionary steps for jawed vertebrates occurred during or before the Silurian period, 444 million to 419 million years ago. Fossil finds pull back the curtain on ...

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 ...

Dedication to William Buckland / Christopher J. Duffin -- Introduction. Vertebrate coprolite studies : status and prospectus / Adrian P. Hunt ... [et al.] -- History of study. The earliest published ...

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 ...

Scientists reveal clues about the evolutionary origin of jaws by studying the embryonic development of zebrafish -- an approach known as 'evo-devo.' Using imaging and cell tracing techniques in ...