Shh signalling plays a crucial role for endoderm development. A Shh endoderm enhancer, MACS1, is well conserved across terrestrial animals with lungs. Here, we first show that eliminating mouse MACS1 causes severe defects in laryngeal development, indicating that MACS1-directed Shh signalling is indispensable for respiratory organogenesis. Extensive phylogenetic analyses revealed that MACS1 eme...

The Upper Cretaceous (Turonian) Akrabou Formation at Asfla in south east Morocco is a marine carbonate succession well-known for its exceptionally preserved, often three-dimensional vertebrate fossils. It perhaps best known diverse ichthyological assemblage comprising both cartilaginous and bony fishes, notably teleosts pycnodonts. However, holostean fishes (Holostei), particularly gars (Gingly...

which water is pumped from the oropharyngeal chamber, across the gills and into the parabranchial chambers. At the same time, blood is pumped through the gills, where it picks up oxygen from the water and loses carbon dioxide. The movement of water across the gills involves the action of two pumps: a pressure pump that pushes water across the gills from the oropharyngeal to the parabranchial ca...

Dispersal is a fundamental species characteristic that should directly affect both rates of gene flow among spatially distributed populations and opportunities for speciation. Yet no single trait associated with dispersal has been demonstrated to affect both micro- and macroevolutionary patterns of diversity across a diverse biological assemblage. Here, we examine patterns of genetic differenti...

The lantern shark genus Etmopterus contains approximately 40 species of deep-sea bioluminescent cartilaginous fishes. They emit blue light mainly from the ventral body surface. biological functions this bioluminescence have been discussed based on luminescence patterns, but mechanism remains uncertain. In study, we detected both coelenterazine and coelenterazine-dependent luciferase activity in...

Introduction The inner ear hair cells of fishes can provide insight into the early evolution vertebrate structure. Fishes represent some first vertebrates to evolve auditory capacity, and same basic structure, sensory cell, provides fundament for vestibular function in jawed vertebrates. Despite holding critical basal position evolutionary tree gnathostomes, relatively little is known about ela...

F ar more biomass is contained in marine primary producers than in marine animals at higher levels of the food chain. This relation suggests that animals—par-ticularly secondary consumers such as fishes—must play a negligible role in elemental cycling in the world's oceans (1). However, given that the midwater ecosystem is the largest on Earth, with over 99.5% of the habitable space (2), the ac...