vertebrates

They describe the extent of vertebrate pollination — it's performed by no fewer than 960 bird species, along with dozens of mammals and reptiles — and analyze 126 experiments in which plants were enclosed in screens that only allowed insects through. Without vertebrates to pollinate them, those plants ...

“Our study reveals some groups of virus have been in existence for the entire evolutionary history of the vertebrates — it transforms our understanding of virus ... Because the evolutionary histories of these viruses generally matched those of their vertebrates, the scientists were able to conclude that these ...

It turns out that bees aren't the only crucial players when it comes to plant pollination, as several different vertebrates are also an important part of the process. Mice, birds, bats, and lemurs are all pollinators, and some have even developed complex relationships with certain plants aiding in reproduction.

In plants known to receive flower visitations from vertebrates, fruit and seed production drops 63 percent, on average, when the larger animals, but not insects, are experimentally blocked from accessing the plants, ecologists report in the March cover study for the Ecological Society of America's journal ...

They focussed on viruses specific to vertebrates, and the 214 viruses they found fell into every family or immediate sister-groups of RNA viruses associated with vertebrate infection. Twenty-four percent of those viruses were recovered from different tissues within the same individual. "Fish, in particular, carry ...

"On the one hand, there was this idea that the third eye was simply reduced independently in many different vertebrate groups such as mammals and birds and is retained only in lizards among fully land-dwelling vertebrates," says Krister Smith at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Germany. "On the ...

Researchers have found an ancient monitor lizard with a fourth eye — a discovery that may signal a new wrinkle in the way eyesight evolved in vertebrates. “This tells us how easy it is, in terms of evolution, for a complex organ to self-assemble under certain circumstances,” said Yale paleontologist ...

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 humans. But a new study by researchers from the University of Chicago and the Andalusian Center for Development ...

While previous research has reported examples of maternal stress experience predicting offspring stress hormones in different species, this study is the first to empirically demonstrate the impact of prenatal stress on offspring stress hormone levels using data from all known studies across vertebrates.