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

The study of early vertebrates provides an essential window into the evolutionary processes that shaped modern biodiversity. Fossil discoveries spanning the Silurian to Devonian periods reveal a ...

Ancient fossils from South China reveal the earliest bony fishes and shed new light on how jaws, teeth, and key vertebrate ...

Direct survival benefits in larger groups rather than kin-selected indirect fitness primarily drive the evolution of division of labor in cooperatively breeding vertebrates, particularly under harsh ...

Vertebrates have extremely different brain sizes: even with the same body size, brain size can vary a hundredfold. As a rule, mammals and birds have the largest brains in relation to their body size, ...

Most people don’t think of turtles as being exceptionally chatty—or even making sounds at all. But research published today in Nature Communicationsreveals that at least 50 turtle species vocalize—and ...

A fish thought to be evolution’s time capsule just surprised scientists. A detailed dissection of the coelacanth — a 400-million-year-old species often called a “living fossil” — revealed that key ...

About 445 million years ago, Earth’s oceans turned into a danger zone. Glaciers spread across the supercontinent Gondwana, and shallow seas shrank fast. Ocean chemistry also shifted hard. In what ...