The adaptive immune system of vertebrates represents a major evolutionary innovation that underpins the capacity for antigen-specific recognition, immunological memory and refined regulation of host ...

Archaea are often mistaken as bacteria, given that both are small, single-cell organisms. However, archaea are as genetically different from bacteria as humans are from bacteria. While archaea are ...

The tongue represents a versatile organ whose form and function reflect the ecological niches and feeding strategies of vertebrates. Across fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, lingual ...

The water-to-land transition is a leap in the history of vertebrate evolution and one of the most important scientific issues in vertebrate evolution. Previous studies have shown that vertebrate ...

New research from the University of St Andrews has discovered a crucial piece in the puzzle of how all animals with a spine - including all mammals, fish, reptiles and amphibians - evolved. In a paper ...

The researchers from the HiLIFE Institute of Biotechnology, University of Helsinki compared two central bearded dragon lizards (Pogona vitticeps): a normal one and a mutant with no body scales. They ...

ABOUT 370m years ago, in the latter part of the Devonian period, the ancestor of all land vertebrates stepped out of the ocean and began to take advantage of the untapped riches found ashore. This was ...

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 ...

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, ...

Walking is a complex mechanism involving both automatic processes and conscious control. Its dysfunction can have multiple, sometimes extremely subtle causes, within the motor cortex, brain stem, ...

Millipedes may have been crawling across Earth's landscapes nearly 460 million years ago, long before vertebrates ventured ...

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, ...