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 ...

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

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, ...

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 ...

Protecting large swaths of Earth's land can help stem the tide of biodiversity loss -- especially when those protected areas are in less disturbed landscapes and in countries with effective national ...

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 ...

Deep in the forests of Haiti lives the blue-eyed La Hotte glanded frog (Eleutherodactylus glandulifer), which once went 20 years without being observed by scientists. It belongs to a diverse genus ...