The combined efforts of many fields are advancing our understanding of how number is represented. Researchers studying numerical reasoning in adult humans, developing humans and non-human animals are using a suite of behavioral and neurobiological methods to uncover similarities and differences in how each population enumerates and compares quantities to identify the neural substrates of numerical cognition. An important picture emerging from this research is that adult humans share with non-human animals a system for representing number as language-independent mental magnitudes and that this system emerges early in development.