The origin of vertebrates was accompanied by the advent of a novel cell type: the neural
crest. Emerging from the central nervous system, these cells migrate to diverse locations and …

Biomineralized skeletons are widespread in animals, and their origins can be traced to the
latest Ediacaran or early Cambrian fossil record, in virtually all animal groups. The origin of …

Enamel is the hardest and most resilient tissue in the human body. Enamel includes
morphologically aligned, parallel,∼ 50 nm wide, microns-long nanocrystals, bundled either …

Deuterostomes are the major division of animal life which includes sea stars, acorn worms,
and humans, among a wide variety of ecologically and morphologically disparate taxa …

Hagfish depart so much from other fishes anatomically that they were sometimes considered
not fully vertebrate. They may represent:(i) an anatomically primitive outgroup of vertebrates …

Accumulated records of organic microfossils span billions of years of Earth history. The
majority of this record consists of prokaryotes plus eukaryotes of a protistan grade, yet this …

Abstract Purpose of Review Here, we discuss the origin of chondrocytes, their destiny, and
their plasticity in relationship to bone growth, articulation, and formation of the trabeculae …

The interrelationships between major living vertebrate, and even chordate, groups are now
reasonably well resolved thanks to a large amount of generally congruent data derived from …

Ancestral vertebrate habitats are subject to controversy and obscured by limited, often
contradictory paleontological data. We assembled fossil vertebrate occurrence and habitat …

The timescale of animal diversification has been a focus of debate over how evolutionary
history should be calibrated to geologic time. Molecular clock analyses have invariably …