"The vertebrate skeleton is one of nature's most amazing feats. Composed of cartilage and bone, it forms the supportive structure for all the remaining aspects of our anatomy. Stripped of skin, we can ...

In vertebrates, the skeleton of different regions of the body arises from different precursor cells. Researchers at the University of Basel have now discovered that these skeletal cells do not just ...

Before the evolution of legs from fins, the axial skeleton - including the bones of the head, neck, back and ribs - was already going through changes that would eventually help our ancestors support ...

A tiny fossil fish, roughly 3 centimeters long and approximately 436 million years old, has been identified as the oldest ...

Vertebrate skeletal tissues exhibit remarkable diversity in both their mechanical properties and evolutionary adaptations. These tissues are finely tuned composite materials where a combination of ...

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 ...

For more than 140 years, Mixodectes pungens, a species of small mammal that inhabited western North America in the early Paleocene, was a mystery. What little was known about them had been mostly ...

A huge virtual gallery of museum skeletons is fully open for viewing. A large group of scientists has painstakingly created 3D reconstructions of thousands of vertebrate specimens, which are now ...