The primitive chordate Pikaia gracilens lived 508 million years, and this eel-like creature is still inspiring debate to this day.

Lancelets (‘amphioxus’) are the modern survivors of an ancient chordate lineage, with a fossil record dating back to the Cambrian period. Here we describe the structure and gene content of the ...

Echinoderms (starfish and sea urchins) and chordates evolved from a common ancestor millions of years ago. Yet, the evolution of the complex chordate body plan remains a key unanswered tenet of ...

Oikopleura has a characteristic chordate body plan, with a dorsal, hollow nerve cord, a notochord and pharyngeal gill slits. The fully grown adult has a head/trunk about 1 mm in length, and a ...

The chordate O. dioica is an organism evolutionary close to vertebrates. They both share a similar body plan and some organs or homologue structures like heart, brain or skeleton musculature ...

The Cambrian fossil record indicates that most animal phyla had diversified and inhabited the Earth's oceans approximately 518 million years ago. But even though chordates—the group that ...