Standing proudly across an open grassland, the great bustard is one of the world's heaviest birds capable of sustained flight. Adult males can weigh over 15 kilograms (33 pounds), making this ...

Fossil of Tiktaalin, an extinct fish. Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons ...

New fossil evidence is overturning a long-held assumption about how vertebrates first transitioned from water to land. The hatchlings of three different animals related to the earliest land-goers show ...

Take a deep breath in, and your chest rises. Blow that air out, and your chest falls. While that breathing system might seem mundane, it’s shared by many modern-day creatures, including mammals, ...

Researchers say Earth’s vertebrate diversity may be far greater than scientists realized. DNA evidence suggests many familiar species actually hide multiple genetically distinct “cryptic” species that ...

A new study, led by the University of Vienna and the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, shows how the eyes of adult marine bristleworms continue to grow throughout life – driven by a ring of ...

"In vertebrate examples of life-long growth as fishes and amphibians – such stem cells supply the eye with fresh retinal neurons while the animal develops," explains senior author Florian Raible, ...

Marine communities around the world show trophic convergence in similar environments, complementing our understanding of the factors that determine the biogeography of marine species. The existence of ...

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Researchers have long assumed that a tube in the famous Pikaia fossil ran along the animal’s back. But a new study turned the fossil upside down. By Carl Zimmer Over the past 500 million years, ...

Whole-genome duplications are rare evolutionary events in which all the chromosomes and genes of a species are doubled. This supplies new genetic material to the gene pool and can provide an ...

Charles Darwin proposed that evolution is driven by gradual variations in organisms that have a survival advantage in a changing environment. But University of Maryland evolutionary biologist Karen ...