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Article
An exceptional Devonian fish from Australia sheds light on tetrapod origins
The evolutionary transition from water to land exerts a continuing fascination, heightened by recent discoveries of transitional fossils in Canada and the reinterpretation as tetrapods (or near-tetrapods) of f...
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Article
An arid-adapted middle Pleistocene vertebrate fauna from south-central Australia
A rich source of fossils recently discovered in caves beneath the arid, treeless Nullarbor Plain of western Australia offers a rare glimpse of life in the continent in the Middle Pleistocene (between around 80...
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Article
Live birth in the Devonian period
The placoderms, now long extinct, were a large and diverse group of fishes, thought to be the most primitive known vertebrates with jaws. Not so primitive, however, that they could not have given birth to live...
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Article
Devonian arthrodire embryos and the origin of internal fertilization in vertebrates
The recent discovery of evidence for internal fertilization and live birth in ptyctodonts, a small group of the extinct fossil fishes known as placoderms, provided a rare glimpse of an ancient form of reproduc...
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Article
The earliest known stem-tetrapod from the Lower Devonian of China
Recent discoveries of advanced fish-like stem-tetrapods (for example, Panderichthys and Tiktaalik) have greatly improved our knowledge of the fin-to-limb transition. However, a paucity of fossil data from primiti...
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Article
Spiracular air breathing in polypterid fishes and its implications for aerial respiration in stem tetrapods
The polypterids (bichirs and ropefish) are extant basal actinopterygian (ray-finned) fishes that breathe air and share similarities with extant lobe-finned sarcopterygians (lungfishes and tetrapods) in lung st...
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Article
Copulation in antiarch placoderms and the origin of gnathostome internal fertilization
The discovery of claspers in fossils of antiarch placoderms, an ancient group of armoured fish, suggests that internal fertilization was the ancestral type of reproduction for all jawed vertebrates: this contr...
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Article
Neurocranial development of the coelacanth and the evolution of the sarcopterygian head
The neurocranium of sarcopterygian fishes was originally divided into an anterior (ethmosphenoid) and posterior (otoccipital) portion by an intracranial joint, and underwent major changes in its overall geomet...
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Article
Elpistostege and the origin of the vertebrate hand
The evolution of fishes to tetrapods (four-limbed vertebrates) was one of the most important transformations in vertebrate evolution. Hypotheses of tetrapod origins rely heavily on the anatomy of a few tetrapo...
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Article
Author Correction: Elpistostege and the origin of the vertebrate hand
An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.