For human beings and 99.8% of our fellow vertebrates, having jaws is an integral part of life. Just try eating a taco without them. But, like everything else in our bodies, jaws had to start somewhere. Researchers on Wednesday described the earliest-known vertebrates that possessed jaws as revealed by fossils of four remarkable fish species unearthed in China, two dating from 436 million years ago and two from 439 million years ago. Until now, only scrappy fossils of vertebrates from that critical time in the evolution of animals with backbones had been known, leaving the earliest ones with jaws as something of a mystery. An artist's life reconstruction of the Silurian Period fish Qianodus duplicis, whose fossils were discovered in Shiqian county of Guizhou province in China, is see...
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