Individual Greenland sharks appear to live perhaps a century longer than any other vertebrate, and might have life spans approaching 500 years. By human standards, a few vertebrate species have ...

An international team of ecologists, life scientists, conservationists and biologists has found that humans prey on approximately one-third of all vertebrate species in existence. In their study, ...

Scientists have discovered that Greenland sharks may be the longest-living animals on the planet. These incredible creatures ...

What did the last common ancestor of the vertebrate animals—a very small, soft-bodied marine organism that lived about 600 million years ago—look like? While the portrait is still emerging, a new ...

A team of herpetologists at the Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz just reported that a tiny frog found only in a hilltop forest in southern Bahia, Brazil, may be the smallest vertebrate in the world ...

Reference genome assemblies provide a map of a species’ DNA sequence and its spatial context—that is, where along the chromosomes a specific piece of DNA sequence can be found. In the past, the ...

The Vertebrate Genomes Project: It's an ambitious effort by an international group of scientists to create a "Genome Ark" by sequencing the genomes of about 70,000 animal species. The hope is that ...

Researchers report that ancient viruses may be to thank for myelin -- and, by extension, our large, complex brains. The team found that a retrovirus-derived genetic element or 'retrotransposon' is ...

The Marine Vertebrate Collection at Scripps Institution of Oceanography houses one of the most comprehensive assemblages of marine fishes in the world. With over two million specimens representing ...

A team of biologists found that the picture of dramatically declining vertebrate populations of all kinds is driven by a small number of outlier populations whose numbers are dropping at extreme rates ...