Those of you who took high school biology may remember the lancelet, also known as the amphioxus. Its simplified body plan is notable for containing a number of features that it shares in common with ...

In a primitive marine organism, scientists find photosensitive cells that may be ancestral to the "circadian receptors" in the mammalian retina. Among the animals that are appealing "cover models" for ...

Berkeley — The newly sequenced genome of a dainty, quill-like sea creature called a lancelet provides the best evidence yet that vertebrates evolved over the past 550 million years through a four-fold ...

WOODS HOLE, MASS. -- Among the animals that are appealing "cover models" for scientific journals, lancelets don't spring readily to mind. Slender, limbless, primitive blobs that look pretty much the ...

Professor Steve Gentleman poses with a human brain at the Multiple Sclerosis and Parkinson’s UK Tissue Bank at Imperial College London, June 3, 2016. Reuters/Neil Hall The current conventional ...

Research on the genome of a marine creature led by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego is shedding new light on a key area of the tree of life. Linda Holland, a research ...

Shine a blue light on a lancelet and it glows green. Why these fish-like invertebrates, also known as “amphioxus,” have this green glowing protein has both intrigued and puzzled scientists for nearly ...

An ancient sea creature, discovered off the coast of Scotland in 2011, has shed new light on how evolution formed the modern brain. An international team involving researchers at the University of St ...

Scientists have created an “atlas of vertebrate decay,” which documents — with pictures! — the changes a handful of species go through as they decompose. And yes, there is an actual scientific purpose ...

The textbook tale of vertebrate origins is brought into question by phylogenetic analyses of new genomic data. But the amphioxus, long viewed as a precursor to fish, remains a central character in ...