PBS
Why Does Caffeine Exist?
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?
PBS
Why Do Things Keep Evolving Into Crabs?
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?
PBS
Why Did These Ancient Gophers Have Horns?
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...
Curated Video
When The "Combat Wombat" Became An Apex Predator
In Australia, evolution built a family of deadly predators by taking a group of cute, harmless herbivores and turning them murderous.
PBS
When Pterosaurs Walked
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...
PBS
When Penguins Went From The Sky To The Sea
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.
PBS
When Lizards Took Over the World
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.
PBS
When It Was Too Hot for Leaves
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?
PBS
When Hobbits Were Real
Its discoverers named it Homo floresiensis, but it’s often called “the hobbit” for its short stature and oddly proportioned feet. And it’s been at the center of a major controversy in the field ever since. Was it its own species? Or was...
PBS
When Giant Millipedes Reigned
This giant millipede was the largest known invertebrate to ever live on land. So how did it get so big??
PBS
When Giant Lemurs Ruled Madagascar
Just a few thousand years ago, the island of Madagascar was inhabited by giant lemurs. How did such a diverse group of primates evolve in the first place, and how did they help shape the unique environments of Madagascar? And how did...
PBS
When Bats Took Flight
Bats pretty much appear in the fossil record as recognizable, full-on, flying bats. And they show up on all of the continents, except Antarctica, around the same time. So where did bats come from? And which of the many weird features...
PBS
When Ants Domesticated Fungi
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?
PBS
When Ancient People Changed Their Own DNA
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PBS
When a Giant Pterosaur Ruled the European Islands
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.
PBS
What Happened To Primates In North America?
Early primates not only lived in North America -- our primate family tree actually originated here! So what happened to those early relatives of ours?
PBS
We Can “Bring Back” The Woolly Mammoth. Should We?
In the quest to understand how evolution basically built the woolly mammoth, we may have found the blueprints for building them ourselves.
PBS
These Fossils Were Supposed To Be Impossible
Hidden in rocks once thought too old to contain complex life we may have found the animal kingdom’s oldest known predator.
PBS
These Creatures Were Darwin's Greatest Enemy
They may not look like much, but beneath that shell lies an evolutionary mystery - one that stumped the biggest names in natural history for over a hundred years.
PBS
The Sudden Rise of the First Colossal Animal
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.
PBS
The Mystery Of The Mashed-Up Dinosaurs
How the therizinosaurs lived and evolved ended up being just as weird as their mixed-up anatomy.
PBS
The Missing Link That Wasn’t
The myth of the Missing Link--the idea that there must be a specimen that partly resembles an ape but also partly resembles a modern human--is persistent. But the reality is that there is no missing link in our lineage, because that’s...
PBS
The Invisible Barrier Keeping Two Worlds Apart
In between two of the islands of Indonesia, there’s an ancient line that is both real and…not real.
PBS
The Genes We Lost Along the Way
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...