The basic decision-making circuitry underlying social behaviors such as fighting and mating is incredibly similar in all vertebrates, from fish to mammals, new research suggests. These networks may be ...

A stunningly preserved, soft-bodied fish that is more than 500 million years old could be the ancestor of almost all living vertebrates. The fossilized fish, called Metaspriggina, sports ...

Researchers recently discovered that the sea lamprey, a modern representative of ancient jawless vertebrates, fights invading pathogens by generating up to 100 trillion unique receptors. These ...

Individual Greenland sharks appear to live perhaps a century longer than any other vertebrate, and might have life spans approaching 500 years. By human standards, a few vertebrate species have ...

As it turns out, the spineless and the brave stand up to adversity the same way. A key protein involved in animals’ physiological responses to stress has carried out the same function since before any ...

Note to readers: In the scratch-and-sniff version of this article, you will smell rotting hagfish, dissected worm guts and a suitcase full of slime. Don't worry — you won't need a gas mask to read it.

Researchers have elucidated the evolutionary origins of placodes and neural crests, which are defining features of vertebrates, through lineage tracing and genetic analysis in Ciona intestinalis, a ...

The findings suggest that the appearance of the vertebrate head skeleton ‘did not depend on evolution of a new skeletal tissue, as is commonly thought, but on the spread of this tissue throughout the ...

The small teeth lining cichlid fishes’ throats won’t make it into any baby scrapbooks, but the nubs have helped researchers figure out how vertebrates got their chompers. Research has uncovered what ...