Many vertebrates replace teeth through shedding of the functional tooth. New analyses of a fossil fish demonstrate that shedding involved tooth resorption, a primitive feature in bony fishes, but absent in sharks and their relatives.

The size and shape of red blood cells (RBCs) provide key information on life-history strategies in vertebrates. However, little is known about how RBC evolved response to environmental factors, body the role evolutionary rate. Here, we analysed morphometrics a set Teleostei (bony fishes) Elasmobranchii (sharks rays) species testing hypothesis that phylogenetic relationship explains occupation m...

Ancient mass extinction events such as the end-Permian and endTriassic crises provide analogues for multistressor global change of ocean warming, pH reduction, and deoxygenation. Organism physiology is hypothesized to be a key trait influencing vulnerability to these stressors, but it is not certain how physiology predicts survival over evolutionary time scales and when organisms are faced with...

Recent discoveries of early bony fishes from the Silurian and earliest Devonian of South China (e.g. Psarolepis, Achoania, Meemannia, Styloichthys and Guiyu) have been crucial in understanding the origin and early diversification of the osteichthyans (bony fishes and tetrapods). All these early fishes, except Guiyu, have their dermal skeletal surface punctured by relatively large pore openings....

In this review, we present an overview of the recent advances of genomic technologies applied to studies of fish species belonging to the superclass of Osteichthyes (bony fish) with a major emphasis on the infraclass of Teleostei, also called teleosts. This superclass that represents more than 50% of all known vertebrate species has gained considerable attention from genome researchers in the l...

Vertebrates are a good model to study macroevolu-tionary patterns and processes because they possess a comparatively well known fossil record (Carroll 1997). Thanks to the detailed investigations of several generations of morphologists and pale-ontologists over the last two centuries, it has been possible to reconstruct the phylogeny of vertebrates with some degree of confidence (Fig. 18.1). A ...