Search Results for: Vertebrates
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1,543 results
1,543 results for: Vertebrates
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Anemone reveals complex past
The starlet sea anemone, a primitive creature with ancient evolutionary roots, has a surprisingly complex genome.
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Protein Lineages: Randomness was crucial to ancient genetic changes
Reconstruction of an ancient protein shows how seemingly unimportant mutations paved the way for its evolution into a molecule with an essential modern role.
- Health & Medicine
The two faces of prion proteins
Scientists are learning more about the protein behind mad cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, including how to interfere with the protein’s production in the brains of mice.
- Animals
We all sing like fish
From opera singers to toadfish, vertebrates may use basically similar circuitry for controlling vocal muscles.
- Life
How the snake got its fangs
A study of snake embryos suggests that fangs evolved once, then moved around in the head to give today’s snakes a variety of bites.
- Life
Female frogs play the field
A female frog insures a safe home for her young by mating with many males.
- Life
Climate warms, creatures head for the hills
Unusual data let scientists test predictions that global warming drives species up slopes.
- Chemistry
Class Acts from New Pesticides: Chemicals have little effect on mammals
Two new classes of selective pesticides immobilize and eventually kill many crop-damaging insects by interfering with a cell receptor unique to those pests.
- Paleontology
Raptor Line: Fossil finds push back dinosaur ancestry
Fossils of a newly discovered raptor dinosaur species suggest that the reptile's lineage is older and more widespread than previously suspected.
- Animals
Proxy Vampire: Spider eats blood by catching mosquitoes
Researchers studying food preferences among spiders report finding the first one with a taste for vertebrate blood.
- Paleontology
Caribbean Extinctions: Climate change probably wasn’t the culprit
Remains of extinct sloths unearthed in Cuba and Haiti indicate that the creatures persisted in Caribbean enclaves until about 4,200 years ago, a finding that almost absolves climate change following the last ice age as a cause for the die-offs.
- Paleontology
Mmmm, that’s crunchy
Isotopic analyses of the teeth of otters and mongooses from Africa have led one paleontologist to suggest that some of humanity's ancient kin shared those modern animals' preference for shelled prey such as freshwater crabs and snails.
