The earliest recorded vertebrates had four eyes to escape predators in the ancient Cambrian ocean, according to half-a-billion-year-old fossils from China that shed light on our evolutionary origins.

New research from the University of St Andrews has discovered a crucial piece in the puzzle of how all animals with a spine—including all mammals, fish, reptiles and amphibians—evolved. In a paper ...

The earliest ancestors of all backboned animals, including humans, may have viewed the world with four eyes, not just two.

Learn how a second pair of eyes helped this 518-million-year-old fish evade predators.

The study of early vertebrates provides an essential window into the evolutionary processes that shaped modern biodiversity. Fossil discoveries spanning the Silurian to Devonian periods reveal a ...

Rare fossils discovered in southern China reveals that the earliest creatures with spines — ...

Fossils of the prehistoric fish genus myllokunmingiid, more than 518 million years old, reveal that early vertebrates may have had four functional eyes. Researchers found that two large lateral eyes ...

Scientists have investigated lamprey embryos using cutting-edge microscopic techniques to reveal interesting insights about vertebrate head evolution, clarifying an unresolved mystery in basic science ...

Researchers report February 15 in the journal Cell that ancient viruses may be to thank for myelin—and, by extension, our large, complex brains. The team found that a retrovirus-derived genetic ...

In DNA, retrotransposons can move around and insert themselves into other parts of genomes with a kind of copy and paste mechanism. Most have lost this ability in humans, but they still make up a ...