The mystery of chordate origins has endured for more than 150 years. Shortly after Darwin's On the Origin of Species, acorn worms were discovered to have chordate-like pharyngeal gill slits 1,2 and to ...

Lancelets, or amphioxus, are small worm-like marine animals that spend most of their lives buried in the sea floor, filter-feeding through jawless, ciliated mouths. The vertebrate affinities of these ...

The planktonic organism <em>Oikopleura dioica</em>, an animal model in the study of evolution and embryonic development in our phylum (chordates), has lost most of ...

A new study led by researchers of the University of Barcelona and the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio), published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, proves once more that evolution ...

The Middle Cambrian chordate known as Pikaia gracilens was once thought to be humanity’s earliest known ancestor, and the earliest known member of the phylum Chordata. Now, a new study flips this ...

Life began on earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, but the history of humans and other vertebrates accounts for only a fraction of this timescale. Chordates (a group that includes vertebrates) and ...