Archaea are often mistaken as bacteria, given that both are small, single-cell organisms. However, archaea are as genetically different from bacteria as humans are from bacteria. While archaea are ...

The first four-legged vertebrates did not grow up like tadpoles after all. That idea has shaped the story of life on land for ...

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, ...

The sympathetic nervous system, which enables the fight-or-flight response, was thought to be present only in jawed vertebrates. Analysis of a jawless vertebrate suggests that this system might be a ...

The world's longest-lived vertebrate puzzled scientists for decades, until radioactive carbon released by thermonuclear ...

Millipedes may have been crawling across Earth's landscapes nearly 460 million years ago, long before vertebrates ventured ...

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 ...

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, ...

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, ...

Walking is a complex mechanism involving both automatic processes and conscious control. Its dysfunction can have multiple, sometimes extremely subtle causes, within the motor cortex, brain stem, ...

A team of herpetologists at the Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz just reported that a tiny frog found only in a hilltop forest in southern Bahia, Brazil, may be the smallest vertebrate in the world ...