The phrase
"early vertebrates" refers to the first types of animals with a backbone or spine.
Full definition
«Our embryological research helps us understand exactly how the gill structures
in early vertebrates such as Metaspriggina relate to the gills of living forms,» says Gillis.
If the denticles of some
very early vertebrate had migrated into the jaw, grown larger and gained new functions, the speculation went, they could have given rise to modern choppers.
It was widely ignored until Philippe Janvier cited my paper in the definitive book
on early vertebrates.
Just like the opsins were multiplied and evolved distinct functions in
early vertebrate evolution, also the transducins and their target enzyme were duplicated and diverged to separate functions.
«The scales of most fish that live today are very different from the ancient scales
of early vertebrates,» says study author Dr Andrew Gillis from Cambridge's Department of Zoology and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole.
This evidence suggests that hard parts appeared in order to make
the earliest vertebrates more efficient hunters and killers, says Purnell.
Conodonts, tiny eel - like creatures that lived from 520 million to 205 million years ago and were
our earliest vertebrate relatives, have long been one of paleontology's great enigmas.
In fish and amphibians,
the early vertebrates, the olfactory system sits right next to multimodal areas of the cerebral cortex, where the processing of the different senses overlaps.
«I could readily entertain the possibility that
earlier vertebrates were making migrations between fresh water and salt,» he says.
Palaeontologists had thought heterostracan «fish» from about 475 million years ago to be
the earliest vertebrates.
«This variation made us wonder how
the earliest vertebrates built their backbones.»
I did field work in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and found ample evidence in the sediment — which contained early jawless fishes, some of the oldest fragments known — for signatures of freshwater deposits, [which suggest that
the earliest vertebrates originated in freshwater streams and rivers].
Speech, right - handedness, facial recognition and the processing of spatial relations can be traced to brain asymmetries in early vertebrates
Pterosaurs were among
the earliest vertebrates to steadily flap their wings to power their flying.
They report that the genes encoding the different subunits of PDE6 in cones and rods arose from ancestral genes that duplicated in
the early vertebrate genome doublings, and further expanded in teleosts due to the extra genome duplication that took place in this lineage.
It also suggests that
early vertebrates, and by extension humans, really needed to know if there were other animals around, some of which could be eaten, and some of which could do the eating.