Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. After an ancient extinction killed about 85% of marine species, survivors in isolated refuges helped jawed vertebrates diversify ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...