Clarifying how genome duplication and triplication events shaped early vertebrate genomes has presented a challenge in evolutionary biology. The genome of the jawless hagfish provides a missing piece ...

Scientists once thought that humans must have 2 million genes to account for all our complexity. But since sequencing the human genome, researchers have learned that humans only have about 19,000 to ...

Using the largest and most informative molecular phylogenetic dataset ever analysed, evolutionary biologists were able to construct a new phylogenetic tree of jawed vertebrates. This new tree resolves ...

Lancelets, or amphioxus, are small worm-like marine animals that spend most of their lives buried in the sea floor, filter-feeding through jawless, ciliated mouths. The vertebrate affinities of these ...

The researchers from the HiLIFE Institute of Biotechnology, University of Helsinki compared two central bearded dragon lizards (Pogona vitticeps): a normal one and a mutant with no body scales. They ...

Researchers have discovered that spider webs serve as fascinating collectors of genetic material from nearby vertebrates. In ...

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 ...

Lampreys are an extremely bizarre order of fishes. Together with their cousins, the hagfish, they are the only living group of vertebrates branching from the family tree of animals before they had ...

A new study, led by the University of Vienna and the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, shows how the eyes of adult marine bristleworms continue to grow throughout life—driven by a ring of ...

"In vertebrate examples of life-long growth as fishes and amphibians – such stem cells supply the eye with fresh retinal neurons while the animal develops," explains senior author Florian Raible, ...