WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The South American lungfish is an extraordinary creature - in some sense, a living fossil. Inhabiting slow-moving and stagnant waters in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, ...

In an important discovery, researchers from the Polish Geological Institute-National Research Institute have uncovered fossilized trackways in the Holy Cross Mountains, Poland, which are believed to ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Primitive fish already may have possessed the genetic wiring needed to grow hands and feet well before the appearance of the first animals with limbs roughly 365 million years ...

Scientists have sequenced the largest genome of all animals, the lungfish genome. Their data help to explain how the fish-ancestors of today's land vertebrates were able to conquer land. Thirty times ...

A stone slab barely half a meter wide is shaking the foundations of evolutionary science. Embedded in the slab’s fine sandstone are delicate imprints: long toes ending in sharp claws, left by an ...

What do we have in common with fish, besides being vertebrates? The types of joints we (and most vertebrates) share most likely originated from the same common ancestor. But it’s not a feature that we ...

Why do you have five fingers? Why not ten, or twenty, or one? Why do so many animals have five fingers? Five seems to be the perfect number for most hands. Oddly, the first vertebrates to come onto ...

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 ...

EMBARGOED UNTIL WEDNESDAY, 14. AUGUST 2024, 17:00 CEST (16:00 LONDON TIME, 11:00 US EASTERN TIME) Join us as we travel back in time! We have arrived in the Devonian period, some 420 to 360 million ...