A trove of fossils in China, unearthed in rock dating back some 436 million years, have revealed for the first time that the mysterious galeaspids, a jawless freshwater fish, possessed paired fins.

How did the complexity of many organisms living today evolve from the simpler body plans of their ancestors? This is a central question in biology. Take our hands, for example: Every time we type a ...

WOODS HOLE, Mass. -- As biologists know, nature can take its sweet time explaining itself. Andrew Gillis, associate scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), has been investigating how the ...

Performance on the dance floor may not always show it, but people are rarely born with two left feet. We have genes that instruct our arms and legs to grow in the right places and point in the right ...

As you picture the first fish to crawl out of primordial waters onto land, it’s easy to imagine how its paired fins eventually evolved into the arms and legs of modern-day vertebrates, including ...

Sept. 28 (UPI) --Ancient fossils of a jawless freshwater fish appear to make a connection of the first sign of paired fins and the forerunner of arms and legs, researchers from China and Britain said ...

The genetic toolkit that animals use to build fins and limbs is the same genetic toolkit that controls the development of part of the gill skeleton in sharks, according to research to be published in ...

The paired limbs of humans, and before that the paired fins of fish, evolved from the transformation of gill arches in early fish, scientists say, presenting genetic evidence for this theory. Sharks, ...

The discovery, by an international team, led by Min Zhu of the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology, Bejiing and Professor Philip Donoghue from the University of Bristol’s ...