Search Results for: Vertebrates
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1,512 results
- Health & Medicine
First Line of Defense: Hints of primitive antibodies
After looking in primitive marine invertebrates that are considered to be close relatives to vertebrates, immunologists find families of genes that might provide clues as to how early immune systems evolved.
- Paleontology
First Family’s last stand
New evidence indicates that about 3.2 million years ago, at least 17 Australopithecus afarensis individuals were killed at the same time by large predators at an eastern African site.
- Animals
Stalking Larvae: How an ancient sea creature grows up
Scientists have finally observed living larvae of a sea lily, an ancient marine invertebrate related to starfish.
- Health & Medicine
Protein protects rat brains from strokes
Neuroglobin, a protein related to hemoglobin, may protect the brain during strokes.
- Ecosystems
Why didn’t the beetle cross the road?
Beetle populations confined to specific forest areas by roads seem to have lost some of their genetic diversity.
- Anthropology
Monkey Business
They're pugnacious and clever, and they have complex social lives—but do capuchin monkeys actually exhibit cultural behaviors?
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When to Change Sex
A research team contends that animals that routinely change sex, even those prompted by mate loss or other social cues, tend to do so when they reach 72 percent of their maximum size.
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Visionary Research
Scientists are debating why primates evolved full color vision and whether that development led to a reduced sense of smell.
- Earth
A Dam Shame? Project may slam China’s biodiversity
When the Three Gorges Dam begins to impound the waters of the Yangtze River in China later this year, dozens of mountains and other elevated areas upstream will become islands—an outcome that will probably devastate the rich diversity of species now living along the river.
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Sea squirt’s DNA makes a splash
The DNA sequence of a sea squirt may reveal the origins of vertebrates.
- Paleontology
Feathered fossil still stirs debate
More than 2 years after scientists first described 120-million-year-old fossils of a feathered animal, a new analysis seems to bolster the view that the turkey-size species was a bird has-been and not a bird wanna-be.
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Do oxpeckers help or mostly just freeload?
A textbook example of mutualism—birds that ride around picking ticks off big African mammals—may not be mutually beneficial at all.
