Now, research by Jiang and his colleagues published today (July 7) in Science concludes that yunnanozoans may be among the earliest vertebrates. Vertebrates are thought to have emerged during the ...

Most living vertebrates also possess jaws, teeth and paired fins or limbs. Fossils of the earliest vertebrates help us understand not only how these features originated, but also how they evolved ...

This is the lamprey — a living fossil from an era before fish developed jaws and a creature whose existence spans over 360 ...

One of the first vertebrates that may have ventured onto land, whose remains date from about 364 million years ago, is called Ichthyostega. Although fishlike in many ways, it had robust bony legs ...

And since placodes buzz with genes that also sculpt teeth and fish scales, some scientists think that placodes arose in the earliest vertebrates—a “remarkable conservatism,” argues ...

A fossil creature from the Devonian discovered more recently has been hailed as a vital link between fish and the first vertebrates to walk on land. Found in the Canadian Arctic in 2004 ...

The earliest-known dinosaur fossils date to roughly 230 million ... allowing dinosaurs to take over as the dominant land ...

Evidence for the early evolution of our skeletons can be found in a group of fossil fishes called heterostracans, which lived over 400 million years ago. These fishes include some of the oldest ...

Height map of the rock slab above, preserving the earliest evidence for deep-sea vertebrates. Color coding is related to height, with the warmer colours at the higher elevations.

He doesn't even have a head. If Blob had been born with a spine, or backbone, he would have been a vertebrate. If we give Blob some legs and a head then he can start to move about. There are lots ...