This is the first in a series of posts exploring our origins as vertebrates from backboneless swimming squirts to the masterful primates we are today. The motivation for this is twofold:
1)To give my reader/s an insight into the science behind vertebrate origins, as well as evolution in general, from the perspective of a palaeontology student.
These posts will hopefully address some important questions about vertebrate evolution and diversification. For example;
What is a vertebrate and what isn’t? Where do you draw the line?
What do we know about the origin of vertebrates? How, where and when did they evolve?
What are the closest living relatives of vertebrates?
When did bone/teeth evolve?
When did jaws evolve? (Bizarrely a separate issue from teeth)
What is ‘Dunkles bony one’?
When did sharks evolve?
What is the difference between a goldfish and a coelacanth and why is this important?
When did our ancestors first crawl out of the water? How and why did limbs evolve?
Ultimately, this blog series will attempt to explain how palaeontologists go about reconstructing the tree of life from often scant and meagre fossil material. It would be nice if these posts have some general appeal to anyone stumbling upon this blog, so I’ll do my best to make it both informative, entertaining and, most importantly, regular.
Fig. 1. The tree of animal life. Although simplified it helps to illustrate the astonishing diversity of multicellular life. Our whirlwind evolutionary adventure will take us from basal deuterostomes to mammals, with lots in between.
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