PBS
Animals Are Older Than We Thought
New ReviewWhat are animal-like fossils doing in rocks a billion years old, and what does that mean for our understanding of their evolution and geologic time itself? Turns out, there might've been a long, slow-burning fuse that ultimately ignited...
PBS
Why Is It So Hard to Tell the Sex of a Dinosaur?
New ReviewWhile we think we know a lot about dinosaurs – like how they moved and what they ate – for a long time, we haven’t been able to ID one seemingly basic thing about their biology... Which are males and which are females?
PBS
How Snake Venom Sparked An Evolutionary Arms Race
New ReviewFor some, the rise and spread of venomous elapids was just another challenge to adapt to. For others, it was a catastrophe of almost apocalyptic proportions. And we humans are no exception, because it seems that when elapids slithered...
PBS
What Was The Earliest Surgery?
New ReviewWhen did practicing medicine - in its varied, complex forms (from sharing medicinal plants to the earliest surgeries) - become something that we actually started doing? While it’s a hard question to answer, it’s possible that our...
PBS
What Will Earth Be Like 300 Million Years From Now?
New ReviewWe spend a lot of time here on Eons looking backwards into deep time, visiting ancient chapters of our planet’s history. But this time, we’re taking a look towards the deep future. After all, the story is far from over.
PBS
The Hazy Evolutionary History of Cannabis
New ReviewHow did such a strange plant like cannabis come to be in the first place? When and where did we first domesticate it? And why oh why does it get us high?
PBS
No Single Cradle of Humankind
New ReviewIt would take decades for paleontologists to realize that maybe there wasn’t just one so-called "cradle of humankind," and realize that maybe they’d been asking the wrong question all along.
PBS
The Second Time Sponges Took Over The World
New ReviewResearchers have discovered a piece of a weird, but critical, time in the deep past…a time when the first-ever mass extinction may have turned Planet Earth into Sponge World.
PBS
When The Atlantic Ripped Open A Supercontinent
New ReviewWhile the eruptions of the volcanoes along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge usually don't trouble us, their birth was once responsible for ripping a supercontinent apart and creating the Atlantic Ocean that we know today.
PBS
When India Was An Island
New ReviewWe need to talk about the biggest break-up of all-time: the break-up of the supercontinent Pangea, and how, ultimately, when India smashed back into Asia, it traded one form of evolutionary isolation for another.
PBS
How The Elephant Got Its Trunk
New ReviewLong-jawed proboscideans were doing pretty well for themselves. That is, until they were all rapidly replaced with proboscideans with long, flexible trunks instead: mammoths, mastodons, and our modern elephants.What suddenly made long...
PBS
Where Did the Moon Come From?
New ReviewWhere did our unique moon come from? It turns out that lunar rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts are a clue, pointing to the origin of our closest cosmic companion, an origin even stranger than you might imagine
PBS
How Animals Got Butts
New ReviewWhile the evolution of the butthole was a major breakthrough in animal development, its story might actually end with redefining what it means to have a butthole at all.
PBS
When the Amazon Flowed Backwards
New ReviewWhat did life look like when the Amazon watershed flowed backwards? How did its direction shape the evolution of life around it? And what force could have possibly been strong enough to up-end one of the world’s mightiest rivers between...
PBS
When Neandertals Became Apex Predators
New ReviewClimbing to the summit of the Eurasian food chain was one of the Neandertals’ most impressive evolutionary feats, but in the end, it may have actually been what doomed them.
PBS
How Asteroids Set the Stage for Life on Earth
New ReviewWe may have planet-shattering asteroids to thank for the origin of life on Earth.
PBS
The Mystery of the Cretaceous Pompeii
New ReviewSince the 1990s, paleontologists have been pulling 125-million-year-old complete dinosaur skeletons from the rocks of the Lujiatun in Northeastern China, most seemingly posed in perfect rest. This has prompted comparisons to a famous...
PBS
How Mountains Make Evolution Weird
New ReviewMountains have a unique effect on diversity, messing with our understanding of animals through time, and pretty much just making evolution weird. And they would eventually reveal something even stranger about a group of mammals even...
PBS
Why Wasn't There A Second Age of Reptiles?
New ReviewAn asteroid impact triggered the K-Pg mass extinction, wiping out the non-avian dinosaurs, ending the Age of Reptiles, and ushering in the Age of Mammals. But why was it the mammals who triumphed?
PBS
The Graveyard at the Center of the Earth
New ReviewScientists have been trying to solve the mystery of why plate tectonics works the way it does for over a hundred years. And they might have just uncovered a key to cracking it.
PBS
Webs vs Wings: the Arms Race of the Air
New ReviewSpiders and their ancestors have been driving an arms race that began before either stepped foot onto land and resulted in the first powered flight on Earth. But how did this competition of webs versus wings drive such a massive...
PBS
When Red Pandas Roamed North America
New ReviewHow did a relative of the red panda end up in North America? What can this tell us about how long ago – and how many times – North America was connected to Europe and Asia?
PBS
Could This Sperm Whale Eat The Meg?
New ReviewUnlike in fiction, giant whales do not emerge fully-formed from the ocean deep. So, where did Livyatan melvillei come from? How did such a large predator live? And what caused the titan to die out? The answer may lie in an appetite so...
PBS
Are All Oceans Basically Reincarnated?
New ReviewThis is the hundred-year tale of how an unlikely bunch of bottom-dwelling marine critters helped reveal that ocean basins are basically reincarnated every few hundred million years.