Reference genome assemblies provide a map of a species’ DNA sequence and its spatial context—that is, where along the chromosomes a specific piece of DNA sequence can be found. In the past, the ...

A cheetah pouncing on a gazelle. A bear snatching a fish out of the water with its claws. And the most dangerous predator of them all? A human and their pet bird dancing to “Gangnam Style.” Scientists ...

The Marine Vertebrate Collection (MVC) at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego (ASIH Collection Code: SIO) , is one of the largest and most comprehensive fish collections in the world ...

In the Late Paleozoic (260 million years ago), long before dinosaurs dominated the Earth, ancient precursors to mammals took to the trees to feed on leaves and live high above predators that prowled ...

What did the last common ancestor of the vertebrate animals—a very small, soft-bodied marine organism that lived about 600 million years ago—look like? While the portrait is still emerging, a new ...

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 ...

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 ...

The origin of all living vertebrates just got more mysterious. Since the 1970s, many evolutionary biologists have considered an eel-like, deep-sea-dwelling creature called the hagfish to be the ...

Latest findings support the theory that teeth in the animal kingdom evolved from the jagged scales of ancient fish, the remnants of which can be seen today embedded in the skin of sharks and skate. In ...

The coelacanth is known as a "living fossil" because its anatomy has changed little in the last 65 million years. Despite being one of the most studied fish in history, it continues to reveal new ...

New CU Boulder-led research finds that the traits that make vertebrates distinct from invertebrates were made possible by the emergence of a new set of genes 500 million years ago, documenting an ...