Placodes and neural crests are defining features of vertebrates (animals with a spinal cord surrounded by cartilage or bone). Placodes are embryonic structures that develop into sensory organs such as ...

The fossil vertebrate collection at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History (UCM) was initially built by vertebrate paleontologists in the University of Colorado (CU) Department of ...

The vertebrate body plan emerged in concert with extensive changes to anterior chordate morphology, including assembly of a craniofacial skeleton, expansion of the anterior neuroepithelium into a ...

A new theory aims to explain how the complex vertebrate body, with its skeleton, muscles, nervous and cardiovascular systems, arises from a single cell during development and how these systems evolved ...

The findings suggest that the appearance of the vertebrate head skeleton ‘did not depend on evolution of a new skeletal tissue, as is commonly thought, but on the spread of this tissue throughout the ...

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, ...

The cradle of vertebrate evolution was limited to a zone of shallow coastal waters, no more than 60 meters deep. In those waters, fish — the first vertebrates — appeared roughly 480 million years ago, ...

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 ...