About 445 million years ago, Earth’s oceans turned into a danger zone. Glaciers spread across the supercontinent Gondwana, ...

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 ...

Greenland sharks may have a DNA repair mechanism that maintains their vision for centuries, seemingly preventing retinal ...

Derpy from the side and hellish from below, the lamprey is the bane of the Great Lakes fisheries industry. A jawless, bloodsucking fish, the lamprey is often considered an ancestral early vertebrate ...

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 ...

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 ...

It’s one of the most audacious projects in biology today—reading the entire genome of every bird, mammal, lizard, fish, and all other creatures with backbones. And now comes the first major payoff ...

A feeding method of the extinct jawless heterostracans, among the oldest of vertebrates, has been examined and dismissed by scientists, using fresh techniques. A feeding method of the extinct jawless ...

Producing reference genomes for all known eukaryotic species (~1.8 million) over the next decade is a daunting task. But the Earth BioGenome Project is hoping to do exactly that. Two separate projects ...