The course has been designed to provide students with facts of those prehistoric events that had a major impact on the origin of vertebrates and consecutive trends in their evolutionary diversification and adaptation. To understand these far-back events, we shall take an advantage of the approach that combines achievements of the two fields that are relatively distant in their research subjects: paleobiology (that generates morphological interpretations of fossilized bodies, as well as reconstructions of biological activities of extinct organisms under specific environmental conditions), and developmental biology (that centers on the study of molecular modulation of those characters that makes vertebrates to differ each other). The aim of the present course is to assist students with their comprehension of the potential of integrative cogitation in order to understand the role of developmental processes in the evolution of essential innovations in the body architecture of vertebrates such as the head formation, specialized phenotypes of the mouth apparatus, the origin of limbs, adaptation of inner organs to physically different environments, integumentary changes, termoregulation, enhancements of neuro-sensory structures and processes, etc.). The participants in this course are expect to develop abilities to critically evaluate facts derived from the both fossil record and experimental embryology, and to formulate combined explanations for morphological changes in the evolution of vertebrates within developmental framework.
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