The film discusses the characteristics and classifications of chordates, a group of animals that includes vertebrates and some simpler forms. Key features of chordates include a pharyngeal breathing ...

Biologists have considered nearly every major taxon of animals as the key starting point for the evolution of vertebrates. We survey these ideas, many of which are no longer tenable in the light of ...

The way in which most multicellular organisms have been classified has been the same for more than a century. Only recently have scientists developed the tools and knowledge to question the way we ...

Berkeley — The newly sequenced genome of a dainty, quill-like sea creature called a lancelet provides the best evidence yet that vertebrates evolved over the past 550 million years through a four-fold ...

Some of the great remaining mysteries in zoology concern origins — of multicellularity, complex nervous systems, life cycles and sex, for example. The evolutionary origin of vertebrates is among the ...

Researchers have elucidated the evolutionary origins of placodes and neural crests, which are defining features of vertebrates, through lineage tracing and genetic analysis in Ciona intestinalis, a ...

Studies on brain electrical signaling offer a fresh perspective on vertebrate evolution, provide additional evidence supporting Darwinian views of evolution, and may also lead to more effective ...

The neural crest is characterized by its origin in the CNS, its migratory behaviour and its ability to differentiate into many cell types (multipotency). Although all animals of the chordate phylum, ...

Hagfish represent an ancient lineage of boneless and jawless vertebrates. Among several curious behaviors they exhibit, solitary individuals in one dominant genus of hagfish (Eptatretus spp.) ...