Even Charles Darwin was puzzled by the evolution of the vertebrate eye. New research suggests that it traces back to a cyclopean invertebrate with a single eye atop the head.

The earliest recorded vertebrates had four eyes to escape predators in the ancient Cambrian ocean, according to half-a-billion-year-old fossils from China that shed light on our evolutionary origins.

A harlequin poison dart frog (Oophaga sylvatica) is pictured at the Tesoros de Colombia (Treasures of Colombia) sustainable farm in Nocaima, Cundinamarca department, Colombia, on July 9, 2024.

The earliest ancestors of all backboned animals, including humans, may have viewed the world with four eyes, not just two.

Corticoid receptors, encompassing both glucocorticoid and mineralocorticoid receptors, are pivotal to the regulation of physiological processes across vertebrates. These receptors have evolved through ...

In DNA, retrotransposons can move around and insert themselves into other parts of genomes with a kind of copy and paste mechanism. Most have lost this ability in humans, but they still make up a ...

Scientists have investigated lamprey embryos using cutting-edge microscopic techniques to reveal interesting insights about vertebrate head evolution, clarifying an unresolved mystery in basic science ...

Fossils of the prehistoric fish genus myllokunmingiid, more than 518 million years old, reveal that early vertebrates may have had four functional eyes. Researchers found that two large lateral eyes ...

A research team at Yunnan University has found that the earliest known vertebrates from the Cambrian Period may have ...

Learn how a second pair of eyes helped this 518-million-year-old fish evade predators. Spiders have eight eyes, bees have five, and boxed jellyfish have 24 — but these are the exceptions. The vast ...