Eons

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  E1How our deadliest parasite turned to the dark side

  Jan 11, 2022· 10m

  Around 10,000 years ago, somewhere in Africa, a microscopic parasite made a huge leap. With a little help from a mosquito, it left its animal host - probably a gorilla - and found its way to a new host: us.

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  E2Primates vs Snakes (An Evolutionary Arms Race)

  Jan 19, 2022· 10m

  The Snake Detection Hypothesis proposes that the ability to quickly spot and avoid snakes is deeply embedded in primates, including us - an evolutionary consequence of the danger snakes have posed to us over millions of years.

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  E3How the Rise of Social Insects Shrunk These Dinosaurs

  Jan 27, 2022· 10m

  We often think of dinosaurs as either preying on other dinos or mammals, or as plant-eaters -- but in ecosystems today, those aren’t the only two options. So why would we expect dinosaurs to have only been carnivores or herbivores, with the occasional omnivore thrown in the mix?

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  E4How Vertebrates Got Teeth... And Lost Them Again

  Feb 8, 2022· 10m

  As revolutionary as teeth were, they would go on to disappear in some groups of vertebrates. But why?

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  E5How Horses Went From Food To Friends

  Feb 16, 2022· 10m

  Do our modern horses descend from just one domesticated population, or did it happen many times, in many places? Answering these questions has been tricky, as we’ve needed to bring together evidence from art, archaeology, and ancient DNA…Because, as it turns out, the history of humans and horses has been a pretty wild ride.

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  E6Why We Only Have Ten Toes (It's a Long Story)

  Feb 23, 2022· 10m

  Today, all mammals from humans to bats have five fingers or fewer. Yes, even whales, whose finger bones are hidden in their fins. Birds have four or fewer and amphibians get the best of both worlds, often having four digits on their “hands” and five on their “feet.” But no species of vertebrates have more than five digits, let alone eight!

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  E7Sharks nearly went extinct 19 million years ago #shorts

  Mar 2, 2022· 1m

  There used to be SO MANY sharks...where did they go?

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  E8Dire wolves aren’t wolves at all #shorts

  Mar 3, 2022· 1m

  Dire wolves aren’t actually wolves but what they are might be even cooler.

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  E9Could humans survive if they traveled back in time 3 billion years? #shorts

  Mar 4, 2022· 1m

  Could humans survive during the Precambrian?

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  E10Some trees are more closely related to broccoli than to other trees #shorts

  Mar 7, 2022· 1m

  Don’t be fooled by convergent evolution.

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  E11Human knees are the worst and we have evolution to thank for that #shorts

  Mar 8, 2022· 1m

  Why do human knees suck?

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  E12A crater in Turkmenistan has been on fire for about 50 years #shorts

  Mar 10, 2022· 1m

  And it’s been reported that one of the geologists started it on purpose?

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  E13When a Giant Pterosaur Ruled the European Islands

  Mar 15, 2022· 10m

  The ecological niche of apex predators was empty on Hateg Island, waiting to be occupied by something large, mobile, and powerful enough to fill it.

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  E14Only one human has been excavated from the La Brea Tar Pits #shorts

  Mar 17, 2022· 1m
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  E15Could humans survive a giant space rock colliding with Earth 66 million years ago? #shorts

  Mar 18, 2022· 1m

  Would you have survived the K-Pg Impact?

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  E16The Sudden Rise of the First Colossal Animal

  Mar 22, 2022· 10m

  A truly enormous ichthyosaur around the size of a modern sperm whale, reached its size within just a few million years of taking to the water - a blink of an eye in evolutionary time.

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  E17The Tasmanian tiger is definitely extinct. So why do people keep report sightings of them? #shorts

  Mar 25, 2022· 1m

  Thylacines are definitely extinct!

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  E18The Extreme Hyenas That Didn't Last

  Mar 29, 2022· 10m

  Hyenas weren’t always able to eat bones. In fact, only a few million years ago, they lived very different lives.

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  E19Who forged one of the most famous fake fossils of all time? #shorts

  Mar 31, 2022· 1m
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  E20After this bird went extinct the first time, evolution just hit replay #shorts

  Apr 4, 2022· 1m

  The bird that evolved twice!

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  E21Someone lost the only fossil from what might’ve been the biggest dinosaur ever #shorts

  Apr 5, 2022· 1m
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  E22Would you have survived the biggest mass extinction of all time? #shorts

  Apr 6, 2022· 1m
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  E23An ancient insect trapped in amber has a parasitic mushroom erupting out of it? #shorts

  Apr 8, 2022· 1m

  I will pass on the parasitic mind-controlling mushroom, thanks

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  E24How the Smallest Animal Got So Simple

  Apr 13, 2022· 8m

  We tend to think that evolution only goes in one direction— toward getting bigger and more advanced. But that’s not always the case. This tiny, simple animal, the Myxozoans, (yes, animal!) evolved from something bigger and more complex.

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  E25We know a lot about dinosaurs but...what was the first dinosaur? #shorts

  Apr 14, 2022· 1m
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  E26Why Sour May Be The Oldest Taste

  Apr 20, 2022· 8m

  While sour taste's original purpose was to warn vertebrates of danger, in a few animal groups, including us, its role has reversed. The taste of danger became something it was dangerous for us to avoid.

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  E27The Ancient Human Species With A Missing Body

  Apr 27, 2022· 10m

  Only a handful of Denisovan fossils have been identified. In the absence of actual body fossils, it’s impossible for us to reconstruct their morphology, right?

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  E28Are there dinosaur fossils in space? #shorts

  May 2, 2022· 1m
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  E29Why don’t rabbits get really, really big? #shorts

  May 3, 2022· 1m
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  E30An extinct human species was discovered deep within a cave system #shorts

  May 4, 2022· 1m
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  E31When Ants Domesticated Fungi

  May 10, 2022· 10m

  While we’ve been farming for around 10,000 to 12,000 years, the ancestors of ants have been doing it for around 60 million years. So when, and how, and why did ants start … farming?

• 
  E32The Curious Case of the Cave Lion

  May 17, 2022· 9m

  A mysterious, large feline roamed Eurasia during the last ice age. Its fossils have been found across the continent, and it’s been the subject of ancient artwork. So what exactly were these big cats?

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  E33Is This The Oldest Dad In The Fossil Record?

  May 26, 2022· 8m

  Fossil evidence suggests Diictodon used burrows to breed, and that a parent stayed behind to feed and protect their young. And the parent that stayed behind? It might’ve been the male.

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  E34Why did so many predators die at the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry? #shorts

  May 27, 2022· 1m

  There’s something weird going on at the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry in what’s now Utah.

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  E35What is the most successful human species? #shorts

  May 31, 2022· 1m

  Does Homo erectus beat out Homo sapiens?

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  E36Sharks have antibacterial skin. Can we use that to save lives? #shorts

  Jun 1, 2022· 1m

  Sometimes modern problems require ancient, evolutionary solutions.

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  E37This Ice Age pup's last meal was a woolly rhino #shorts

  Jun 2, 2022· 1m

  What was this ancient pup’s last meal?

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  E38What came first, the sabertooth or the cat? #shorts

  Jun 3, 2022· 1m

  The newest oldest saber-toothed mammal

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  E39How To Build A Woolly Mammoth (But Should We?)

  Jun 8, 2022· 8m

  In the quest to understand how evolution basically built the woolly mammoth, we may have found the blueprints for building them ourselves.

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  E40Something Has Been Making This Mark For 500 Million Years

  Jun 15, 2022· 11m

  Paleodictyon, a hexagonal-patterned fossil, is a bit of a mystery. We don’t even know if it’s a trace fossil, or the organism itself. So… what could it be?

• 
  E41Giant Viruses Blur The Line Between Alive and Not

  Jun 29, 2022· 10m

  In 2003, microbiologists made a huge discovery. One that would force us to reconsider a lot of what we thought we knew about the evolution of microbial life: giant viruses.

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  E42This new giant bacterium is visible to the naked eye #shorts

  Jul 6, 2022· 1m

  Microbiology goes macro with a new giant bacterium!

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  E43Another Spinosaurus study, another opportunity to debate if Spinosaurus was aquatic #shorts

  Jul 7, 2022· 1m

  Spinosaurus had dense bones!

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  E44There were dinosaurs with basically no arms at all, just hands! #shorts

  Jul 8, 2022· 1m

  Guemesia: a new no-arm dino

• 
  E45When Giant Millipedes Reigned

  Jul 13, 2022· 8m

  This giant millipede was the largest known invertebrate to ever live on land. So how did it get so big??

• 
  E46How Plate Tectonics Transformed Los Angeles

  Jul 21, 2022· 14m

  Despite the profound changes we’ve made here in recent history, the epic saga of Los Angeles' natural history is still visible - and even striking - if you know where and how to look for it.

• 
  E47Why Does Caffeine Exist?

  Jul 28, 2022· 11m

  Today, billions of people around the world start their day with caffeine. But how and why did the ability to produce this molecule independently evolve in multiple, distantly-related lineages of flowering plants, again and again?

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  E48This was the biggest earthquake humans ever experienced #shorts

  Aug 3, 2022· 1m

  One of the biggest earthquakes humans ever experienced happened around 3800 years ago in what's now northern Chile.

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  E49Someone stole two of the most important documents in the history of science #shorts

  Aug 3, 2022· 1m

  We have no idea where they were all this time, or who stole and returned them and why.

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  E50You can thank evolution for flesh-eating bees #shorts

  Aug 5, 2022· 1m

  Flesh-eating bees exist!

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  E51This is one of the oldest art workshops ever discovered! #shorts

  Aug 5, 2022· 1m

  Archaeologists have discovered an ancient art workshop

• 
  E52Did An Ancient Pathogen Reshape Our Cells?

  Aug 11, 2022· 9m

  There is one - and only one - group of mammals that doesn’t have alpha-gal: the catarrhine primates, which are the monkeys of Africa and Asia, the apes, and us.

• 
  E53How Whale Evolution Kind Of Sucked

  Aug 18, 2022· 11m

  Mystacodon is the earliest known mysticete, the group that, today, we call the baleen whales. But if this was a baleen whale, where was its baleen? Where did baleen come from? And how did it live without it?

• 
  E54The Fungi That Turned Ants Into Zombies

  Aug 23, 2022· 9m

  This fungus was actually manipulating ants’ movements, forcing them to do something they’d never ordinarily do, something strange, yet specific…

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  E55Did you know that fossils can get sick? #shorts

  Aug 31, 2022· 1m

  Did you know that fossils can get sick? – Specifically with Pyrite Disease

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  E56A supervolcano in Idaho once caused a disaster 900 miles away. #shorts

  Sep 8, 2022· 1m

  Disaster in the great plains!

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  E57A bunch of very important fossils disappeared during WWII. #shorts

  Sep 9, 2022· 1m

  80 years ago, a bunch of fossils of ancient humans disappeared.

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  E58Did this animal poop cubes? Giant cubes? #shorts

  Sep 13, 2022· 1m

  Congrats! You just found a wombat burrow. And the cubes are its poop.

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  E59Are wisdom teeth a problem for us because of evolution? Or because of our development? #shorts

  Sep 14, 2022· 1m

  Wisdom teeth can be such a pain

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  E60Our extinct relative was an ancient leopard’s lunch. #shorts

  Sep 16, 2022· 1m

  Paranthropus got chomped by a leopard

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  E61When did we start wearing clothes? #shorts

  Sep 17, 2022· 1m

  We didn’t always wear clothes!

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  E62Did Megalodon go after whale faces specifically? #shorts

  Sep 22, 2022· 1m

  Ancient sperm whale heads belonged on every shark-cuterie board

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  E63Where Did Water Come From?

  Sep 27, 2022· 12m

  Mercury, Venus, and Mars are all super low on water – so where did ours come from and why do we have so much of it? We think our water came from a few unlikely sources: meteorites, space dust, and even the sun.

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  E64Our Ancient Relative That Said 'No Thanks' To Life On Land

  Oct 4, 2022· 10m

  Around the time that some of our fishapod relatives were crawling out of the water, others were turning around and diving right back in.

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  E65Imagine a cat's mouth fully covering up their saber teeth. #shorts

  Oct 5, 2022· 1m

  We might’ve been wrong about how this saber-toothed cat looked

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  E66Darwin correctly predicted an animal existed without ever seeing it. #shorts

  Oct 7, 2022· 1m

  Sometimes evolution is completely predictable.

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  E67Neandertals weren’t dumb cavemen. In lots of ways, they were just like us. #shorts

  Oct 10, 2022· 1m

  Shanidar 1 got by with a little help from his friends

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  E68Here are two ways to get a fossil species named after you. #shortsFinale

  Oct 14, 2022· 1m

  Here are two ways to get a fossil species named after you.

• 
  E1What Happened to the World's Biggest Beaver?

  Jan 13, 2021· 10m

  It’s important to us that you understand how big this beaver was. Just like modern beavers, it was semiaquatic -- it lived both on the land and in the water. The difference is that today’s beavers do a pretty special thing - one that the giant beaver probably didn’t, or couldn’t, do.

• 
  E2The Reign of the Hell Ants

  Jan 21, 2021· 10m

  This ancient species had the same six legs and segmented body that we’d recognize from an ant today. But it also had a huge, scythe-like jaw and a horn coming out of its head. This bizarre predator belonged to a group known as “hell ants.” But they’re gone now, and we’re still trying to figure out why.

• 
  E3The Pandemic That Lasted 15 Million Years

  Jan 28, 2021· 10m

  Our DNA holds evidence of a huge, ancient pandemic, one that touched many different species, spanned the globe, and lasted for more than 15 million years.

• 
  E4When We First Talked

  Feb 11, 2021· 10m

  The evolution of our ability to speak is its own epic saga and it’s worth pausing to appreciate that. It’s taken several million years to get to this moment where we can tell you about how it took several million years for us to get here.

• 
  E5The Return of Giant Skin-Shell Sea Turtles

  Feb 17, 2021· 10m

  The biggest turtle ever described wasn’t an ancestor of today’s leatherback turtles or any other living sea turtles. But it looks like there are some things about being a giant, skin-shelled sea turtle that just work, no matter where, or when, you lived.

• 
  E6The Genes We Lost Along the Way

  Feb 24, 2021· 10m

  Our DNA holds thousands of dead genes and we’ve only just begun to unravel their stories. But one thing is already clear: we’re not just defined by the genes that we’ve gained over the course of our evolution, but also by the genes that we’ve lost along the way.

• 
  E7Our Bizarre, Possibly Venomous, Relative

  Mar 10, 2021· 10m

  It's possible Euchambersia possessed venom about 20 million years before the first lizards and over 150 million years before the first snakes evolved. We’ve teamed up Sarah Suta from Bizarre Beasts to explore the story of venomous mammals, both living and extinct.

• 
  E8How Worm Holes Ended Wormworld

  Mar 18, 2021· 10m

  Elongated tubes, flat ribbons, and other “worm-like” body plans were so varied and abundant that a part of the Ediacaran is sometimes known as Wormworld. But in the end, the ancient Wormworld was ended by the actions of its very own worms.

• 
  E9How Humans Became (Mostly) Right-Handed

  Mar 24, 2021· 10m

  No other placental mammal that we know of prefers one side of the body so consistently, not even our closest primate relatives. But being right-handed may have deep evolutionary roots in our lineage. And yet, being a leftie does seem to come with some unexpected advantages.

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  E10How Chilis Got Spicy (and Why We Love the Burn)

  Apr 7, 2021· 10m

  Today, chilis are the most widely cultivated spice crop in the world - grown everywhere from their native home in the Americas to Europe, Africa, and Asia. But how and why did chilis evolve this weird, fiery trick in the first place? And why did we learn to love that spicy burn?

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  E11How To Survive the Little Ice Age

  Apr 20, 2021· 10m

  Nunalleq, a village in what’s today southwest Alaska, seemed to have thrived during the Little Ice Age. How did this village manage to survive and prosper during this time period? And what caused this period of climate change in the first place?

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  E12When Crocs Thrived in the Seas

  Apr 29, 2021· 10m

  While dinosaurs were dominating the land, the metriorhynchids were thriving in the seas. But taking that plunge wasn’t easy because it takes a very special set of traits to fully dedicate yourself to life at sea.

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  E13When Trees Took Over the World

  May 12, 2021· 10m

  420 million years ago, the forest floor of what's now New York was covered with a plant that didn’t look like a tree at all, except its roots were made of wood. Instead of looking up to learn about the evolution of trees, it turns out paleobotanists should’ve been looking down all along.

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  E14How Weasels Got Skinny

  May 20, 2021· 10m

  Weasels have an extreme body plan that may push the boundaries of what’s metabolically possible. So when and how did this happen? Why'd the weasels get so skinny?

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  E15Where Are All The Squid Fossils?

  Jun 3, 2021· 10m

  It might surprise you but cephalopods have a pretty good fossil record, with one major exception. If squids were swimming around in the same oceans as their closest cousins, where did all the squids go?

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  E16Did These Giant Sloths Poop Themselves to Death?

  Jul 14, 2021· 10m

  At Tanque Loma, at least 22 giant ground sloths in the genus Eremotherium met their end. Of the five hypotheses that researchers proposed for what killed the sloths, the best supported one right now is that they died surrounded by their own poop.

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  E17The Traits That Spawned the Age of Mammals

  Jul 21, 2021· 10m

  Lots of the traits we think of as defining us as mammals show up pretty early, during the time of the dinosaurs. And, in some cases, they show up a lot earlier and in things that weren’t mammals at all.

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  E18The Island of the Last Surviving Mammoths

  Jul 29, 2021· 10m

  The Wrangel Island mammoths would end up being the final survivors of a once-widespread genus. In their final years, after having thrived in many parts of the world for millions of years, the very last mammoths that ever lived experienced what’s known as a mutational meltdown.

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  E19Where Are All the Medium-Sized Dinosaurs?

  Aug 12, 2021· 10m

  The remains of medium-sized predatory dinosaurs are pretty rare in places where giant predators like T. rex existed. Which is weird, because that’s just not how ecosystems work today.

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  E20How the Starfish Got Its Arms

  Aug 24, 2021· 10m

  The story of how the starfish got its arms reminds us that even animals that might be familiar to us today can have incredibly deep histories - ones that stretch back almost half a billion years.

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  E21The Creature That Stumped Darwin

  Sep 1, 2021· 10m

  Toxodon was one of the last members of a lineage that vanished 11,000 years ago after thriving in isolation for millions of years. And its fossils would inspire a revolutionary thinker to tackle a bigger mystery than Toxodon itself: evolution.

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  E22How Pollination Got Going Twice

  Sep 16, 2021· 10m

  The world of the Jurassic was a lot like ours - similar interactions between plants and insects were happening, but the players have changed over time. Because it looks like pollination by insects actually got going twice.

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  E23How a Supervolcano Ignited an Evolutionary Debate

  Sep 23, 2021· 10m

  The Toba supervolcano was the biggest explosive eruption of the last 2.5 million years. And humans were around to see it, or at least feel its effects! But what were those effects?

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  E24How a Mass Extinction Event Created the Amazon

  Sep 29, 2021· 10m

  The Amazon rainforest of South America is a paradise for flowering plants. But long ago, the landscape that we now think of as the Amazon looked very different. And would you believe that the entire revolution of the Amazon began with just one day?

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  E25When Mammals Only Went Out At Night

  Oct 7, 2021· 10m

  For decades, scientists believed dinosaurs were diurnal and tiny mammals were nocturnal. But as researchers have uncovered more mammalian fossils and studied the biology of different dinosaur species, they’ve found some surprising results.

• 
  E26How Ancient Whales May Have Changed the Deep Ocean

  Oct 21, 2021· 10m

  It looks like the evolution of ocean-going whales like Borealodon may have affected communities found in the deep ocean, like the ones found around geothermal vents. And it turns out that when a whale dies, that’s just the beginning of the story.

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  E27How Dinosaurs Coupled Up

  Oct 28, 2021· 10m

  Dinosaur mating behavior has been the subject of a lot of speculation, but what can we actually say about it from the fossil record?

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  E28When It Was Too Hot for Leaves

  Nov 17, 2021· 10m

  Plants first made their way onto land at least 470 million years ago but for their first 80 million years, leaves as we know them today didn’t exist. What held them back?

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  E29Why The Paleo Diet Couldn't Save The Neanderthals

  Dec 2, 2021· 10m

  These relatives of ours lived in Eurasia for more than 300,000 years. They were expert toolmakers, using materials like stone, wood, and animal bone. They were also skilled hunters and foragers, and may even have created cave art. So what caused the decline and disappearance of their population? Well, in a way...it could’ve been us. But maybe not in the way you might’ve heard.

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  E30The Fossil Record In Your Mouth

  Dec 9, 2021· 10m

  The hardened residue scraped off your teeth at the dentist is called your dental calculus, and your dental calculus is the only part of your body that actually fossilizes while you’re alive! And scientists have figured out how to study & trace the evolutionary history of these microbes over tens of millions of years.

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  E31When Pterosaurs WalkedFinale

  Dec 16, 2021· 10m

  If you know one thing about pterosaurs, it’s that they’re flyers. And while pterosaurs may be well-known for their domination of the skies in the Mesozoic Era, they didn’t live their entire lives in the air. So how did we figure this out? And what were they like when they finally came down?

• No still
  E1That Time the Mediterranean Sea Disappeared

  Jan 9, 2020· 10m

  How could a body of water as big as the Mediterranean just...disappear? It would take decades and more than 1,000 research studies to even start to figure out the cause -- or causes -- of one of the greatest vanishing acts in Earth’s history.

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  E2The Neanderthals That Taught Us About Humanity

  Jan 16, 2020· 10m

  Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Neandertals were thought to have been…primitive. Unintelligent, hunched-over cavemen, for lack of a better word. But the discoveries made in that Iraqi cave provided some of the earliest clues that Neanderthals actually behaved -- and likely thought and felt -- a lot like we do.

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  E3The Giant Dinosaur That Was Missing a Body

  Jan 28, 2020· 10m

  From end to end, its forelimbs alone measured an incredible 2.4 meters long and were tipped with big, comma-shaped claws. But other than its bizarre arms, very little material from this dinosaur had been found: no skull, no feet, almost nothing that could give experts a fuller picture of what this dinosaur actually was.

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  E4How South America Made the Marsupials

  Feb 4, 2020· 10m

  Throughout the Cenozoic Era -- the era we’re in now -- marsupials and their metatherian relatives flourished all over South America, filling all kinds of ecological niches and radiating into forms that still thrive on other continents.

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  E5A Short Tale About Diplodocus' Long Neck

  Feb 11, 2020· 10m

  Long necks gave sauropods a huge advantage when it came to food, but not in the way you think. And this benefit would allow them to become the biggest terrestrial animals of all time!

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  E6When the Rainforests Collapsed

  Feb 19, 2020· 10m

  The Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse set the stage for a takeover that would be a crucial turning point in the history of terrestrial animal life. If it weren’t for that time when the rainforests collapsed - in an extinction event that you probably haven’t heard of - our ancestors might never have made it out of the swamps.

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  E7How a Hot Planet Created the World's Biggest Snake

  Feb 27, 2020· 10m

  About 59 million years ago, the largest animal lurking in the ancient forests of Colombia by far was Titanoboa - the largest snake ever known. It’s only been in the past few years that we’ve put together the many pieces of this puzzling creature, but it turns out that the greatest snake that the world ever saw was made possible by a warming planet.

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  E8When the Sahara Was Green

  Mar 10, 2020· 10m

  The climate of the Sahara was completely different thousands of years ago. And we’re not talking about just a few years of extra rain. We’re talking about a climate that was so wet for so long that animals and humans alike made themselves at home in the middle of the Sahara.

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  E9When Penguins Went From The Sky To The Sea

  Mar 18, 2020· 10m

  Today, we think of penguins as small-ish, waddling, tuxedo-birds. But they evolved from a flying ancestor, were actual giants for millions of years, and some of them were even dressed a little more casually.

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  E10How the Egg Came First

  Mar 25, 2020· 10m

  The story of the egg spans millions of years, from the first vertebrates that dared to venture onto land to today’s mammals, including the platypus, and of course birds. Like chickens? We’re here to tell you: The egg came first.

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  E11How Dogs (Eventually) Became Our Best Friends

  Mar 31, 2020· 10m

  We’re still figuring out the details, but most scientists agree that it took thousands of years of interactions to develop our deep bond with dogs. When did they first become domesticated? Where did this happen? And what did the process look like, in terms of genetics and anatomy?

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  E12When a Billion Years Disappeared

  Apr 15, 2020· 10m

  In some places, the rocks below the Great Unconformity are about 1.2 billion years older than those above it. This missing chapter in Earth’s history might be linked to a fracturing supercontinent, out-of-control glaciers, and maybe the diversification of life itself.

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  E13The Risky Paleo Diets of Our Ancestors

  Apr 22, 2020· 10m

  We can track our history of eating just about anything back through the fossil record and see the impact it’s had on our evolution. Throughout time, part of the secret to our success as a species has been our early - and sometimes fatal - experimentation with food.

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  E14How the Andes Mountains Might Have Killed a Bunch of Whales

  Apr 29, 2020· 10m

  At a site known as Cerro Ballena or Whale Hill, there are more than 40 skeletons of marine mammals -- a graveyard of ocean life dating back 6.5 million to 9 million years ago, in the Late Miocene Epoch. But the identity of the killer that they finally settled on might surprise you.

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  E15How Plants Caused the First Mass Extinction

  May 12, 2020· 10m

  In the middle of the Cambrian, life on land was about to get a little more crowded. And those newcomers would end up changing the world. The arrival of plants on land would make the world colder, drain much of the oxygen out of the oceans and eventually, it would help cause a massive extinction event.

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  E16The Two Viruses That We’ve Had For Millions of Years

  May 20, 2020· 10m

  There’s one kind of herpesvirus that’s specific to one species of primate, and each virus split off from the herpesvirus family tree when the primate split off from its own tree. But of course, humans are a special kind of primate.

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  E17How We Identified One of Earth’s Earliest Animals

  May 28, 2020· 10m

  Scientists had no idea what type of organisms the life forms of the Ediacaran were—lichen, colonies of bacteria, fungi or something else. It turns out, the key to solving the puzzle of Precambrian life was a tiny bit of fossilized fat.

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  E18When Dinosaur Look-Alikes Ruled the Earth

  Jun 9, 2020· 10m

  There were a huge number of croc-like animals that flourished during the Triassic Period. Dinosaurs had just arrived on the scene but it was these animals that truly ruled the Earth, becoming both abundant and diverse.

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  E19The World Before Plate Tectonics

  Jun 16, 2020· 10m

  There was a time in Earth’s history that was so stable, geologists once called it the Boring Billion. But the fact is, this period was anything but boring. In fact, it set the stage for our modern version of plate tectonics - and probably for the rise of life as we know it.

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  E20When Dinosaurs Chilled in the Arctic

  Jun 24, 2020· 10m

  All told, the Arctic in the Cretaceous Period was a rough place to live, especially in winter. And yet, the fossils of many kinds of dinosaurs have been discovered there. So how were they able to survive in this harsh environment?

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  E21How the Walrus Got Its Tusks

  Jul 7, 2020· 10m

  The rise and fall of ancient walruses, and how modern ones got their tusks, is a story that spans almost 20 million years. And while there are parts of the story that we’re still trying to figure out, it looks like tusks didn’t have anything to do with how or what these animals ate.

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  E22The Story of the Dino Stampede

  Jul 16, 2020· 10m

  To try to solve the puzzle of Lark Quarry, experts have turned to a special subfield of paleontology -- paleoichnology, or the study of trace fossils -- to reconstruct exactly what happened on that spot, on that day, nearly 100,000 millennia ago.

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  E23The Biggest Frog that Ever Lived

  Jul 23, 2020· 10m

  Untangling the origins of Beelzebufo -- the giant frog that lived alongside the dinosaurs -- turns out to be one of the most bedeviling problems in the history of amphibians.

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  E24The Dinosaur Who Was Buried at Sea

  Aug 5, 2020· 10m

  Paleontologists have been studying these dinosaurs since the 1830s, but nobody had ever found a specimen like Borealopelta before. The key to all of this exceptional preservation was where ended up after it died and how it got there.

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  E25How We Figured Out Fermentation

  Aug 13, 2020· 10m

  Thanks to a recent adaptation, instead of getting sick from the boozy, fermented fruits, one of our primate ancestors could digest them safely, and get more calories at the same time. This new superpower would open up a whole new nutritional landscape for us: fermented foods.

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  E26The Oddest Couple in the Fossil Record

  Aug 20, 2020· 10m

  To figure out how Thrinaxodon and Broomistega became entombed together, scientists looked at the burrow itself, along with their fossilized bones. And it looks like their luck ran out, when a behavior that usually would’ve helped them survive just didn’t work.

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  E27How Ancient Art Captured Australian Megafauna

  Sep 2, 2020· 10m

  Beneath layers of rock art are drawings of animals SO strange that, for a long time, some anthropologists thought they could only have been imagined. But what if these animals really had existed, after all?

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  E28The Sea Monster from the Andes

  Sep 10, 2020· 10m

  In 1977, a farmer was plowing his field on a plateau high in the Andes mountains when he stumbled upon a giant fossilized skeleton. How did this giant marine reptile end up high in the Andes Mountains?

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  E29When Rodents Had Horns

  Sep 15, 2020· 10m

  These odd rodents belong to a genus known as Ceratogaulus, but they’re more commonly called horned gophers, because, you guessed it, they had horns. And it turns out the horns probably had a purpose - one that rodents would likely benefit from today.

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  E30The First and Last North American Primates

  Sep 30, 2020· 10m

  Early primates not only lived in North America -- our primate family tree actually originated here! So what happened to those early relatives of ours?

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  E31How Plants Became Carnivores

  Oct 7, 2020· 10m

  How and why does botanical carnivory keep evolving? It turns out that when any of the basic things that most plants need aren’t there, some plants can adapt in unexpected ways to make sure they thrive.

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  E32How Ankylosaurs Got Their Clubs

  Oct 13, 2020· 10m

  While clubs are practically synonymous with ankylosaurs, we’ve only started to get to the bottom of how they worked and how this unusual anatomy developed in the first place.

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  E33Why Do Things Keep Evolving Into Crabs?

  Oct 28, 2020· 10m

  For some reason, animals keep evolving into things that look like crabs, independently, over and over again. What is it about the crab’s form that makes it so evolutionarily successful that non-crabs are apparently jealous of it?

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  E34How Plankton Created A Bizarre Giant of the Seas

  Nov 10, 2020· 10m

  At more than 2 meters long, Aegirocassis was not only the biggest radiodont ever, but it also may have been the biggest animal in the Early Ordovician. This bizarre marine giant may have only been possible, thanks to a major revolution among some of the tiniest organisms in the world.

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  E35The Rise and Fall of the Tallest Mammal to Walk the Earth

  Nov 19, 2020· 10m

  It arose from rhino ancestors that were a lot smaller, but Paraceratherium would take a different evolutionary path. Believe it or not, it actually became so big that it probably got close to what scientists think might be the actual upper limit for a land mammal.

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  E36How Humans Lost Their Fur

  Dec 2, 2020· 10m

  We’re the only primate without a coat of thick fur. It turns out that this small change in our appearance has had huge consequences for our ability to regulate our body temperature, and ultimately, it helped shape the evolution of our entire lineage.

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  E37When Lizards Took Over the World

  Dec 9, 2020· 10m

  Lizards are incredibly widespread and diverse but it took them a long time to get to where they are now. Because they used to face some pretty stiff competition from a group of lizard look-alikes.

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  E38When the Earth Suddenly Stopped Warming

  Dec 17, 2020· 10m

  For decades, scientists have been studying the cause of the Younger Dryas, and trying to figure out if something like it could happen again. And it turns out that what caused this event is the subject of a heated debate.

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  E39The Triassic Reptile With "Two Faces"Finale

  Dec 22, 2020· 10m

  Figuring out what this creature’s face actually looked like would take paleontologists years. But understanding this weird animal can help us shine a light on at least one way for ecosystems to bounce back from even the worst mass extinction.

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