Imagine a world where the boundaries between “fish” and “not-fish” blur, where the ancestors of birds and mammals once swam ...

Scientists have recently described one of the world’s tiniest vertebrates: an adorable miniature toad species found in Brazil. They reported their findings in the journal PeerJ. The little guys ...

This story appears in the October 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine. From scales to feathers to fur, vertebrates clothe themselves in a dazzling variety of textures and hues. But ...

A fossil analysis suggests that the yunnanozoan, a wormlike fish that flourished around 520 million years ago, sported structures that were the precursors of the head and jaws of modern vertebrates.

Researchers have long debated about the relationship between avian and mammalian intelligences. One possibility is that intelligence in vertebrates — animals with backbones, including mammals and ...

View Full Profile. Learn about our Editorial Policies. The paucity of fossils from the time of the earliest vertebrates—around 480 million years ago—has made it hard to definitively determine the ...

In vertebrates, the skeleton of different regions of the body arises from different precursor cells. Researchers have now discovered that these skeletal cells do not just differ in their ...

The Paleontology Section continues to actively collect and conduct research on fossil vertebrates from the Cenozoic of the Rocky Mountain region.

Marine vertebrates must surface to transmit data (Holland et al. 2009). Tri-axial accelerometer tags record detailed three-dimensional movements of tagged animals. This generates a thorough ...

A comparative study of vertebrate embryological development focusing on the morphological development (e.g., Differentiation of tissues, organs, and systems) of vertebrates. Evolutionary relationships ...