How did ants take over the world? Well, it looks like they didn’t achieve world domination all by themselves. They may have just been riding the wave of a totally different evolutionary explosion.

Turns out, instead of having bats to thank for the existence of butterflies, the groups we should actually be thanking are…bees and beans.

In 2003, a fossil belonging to a mammaliaform was discovered in an ancient lakebed in what's now China. It was an almost complete skeleton the size of a platypus, a find that complicated the history of mammaliaforms. It painted a picture...

Spiders 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...

Join the Amoeba Sisters as they introduce angiosperms (flowering plants) before exploring flower parts, pollination, and double fertilization in angiosperms! This video also talks about the importance of pollinators.

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...

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?

Perhaps for plants in times of great stress and ecological upheaval, the more DNA the better.

3 billion base pairs is a pretty typical genome size for organisms like us, but there are a few plants and animals with genomes so huge they completely blow this number out of the water. Hosted by: Olivia Gordon

Beetles are the most diverse group of complex organisms on Earth, making up over 20% of all named animal species. One in five species on this planet is...a beetle. How did one group of organisms get THAT massive?

Plants have a hard time finding mates -- their inability to get up and move around tends to inhibit them. Luckily for plants, bees and other pollinator species (including butterflies, moths and birds) help matchmake these lonely plants...

Honeybees have thrived for 50 million years, each colony 40 to 50,000 individuals coordinated in amazing harmony. So why, seven years ago, did colonies start dying en masse? Marla Spivak reveals four reasons which are interacting with...

Once considered the ugly duckling of environmental conservation, seagrass is emerging as a powerful tool for climate action. From drawing down carbon to filtering plastic pollution, marine scientist Carlos M. Duarte details the...

Once evolution finds a trick that works, it tends to repeat it. Here are a few examples of prehistoric animals that look a lot like ones we know today.

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An insect's ability to fly is one of the greatest feats of evolution. Michael Dickinson looks at how a fruit fly takes flight with such delicate wings, thanks to a clever flapping motion and flight muscles that are both powerful and...

In this visually dazzling talk, Jonathan Drori shows the extraordinary ways flowering plants -- over a quarter million species -- have evolved to attract insects to spread their pollen: growing 'landing-strips' to guide the insects in,...

Join us as we explore flower parts, pollination, and double fertilization in angiosperms. We'll also talk about the importance of pollinators, like bees, and the role they play. 00:00 Intro 1:34 What are Angiosperms? 1:48 Fruit 2:29...

Humans know a lot about bees, seeing as they impact both our ecology and our economy. But there's something about bumble bees that we totally missed until recently; a super weird and mysterious behavior that might give them a leg up in...

Squeaks wants to know more about the biggest flower in the world! So Mister Brown teaches him all about this stinky, weird plant - called Rafflesia arnoldii!



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3 billion base pairs is a pretty typical genome size for organisms like us, but there are a few plants and animals with genomes so huge they completely blow this number out of the water.

More than 90% of the plants on Earth are angiosperms, flowering plants whose seeds are enclosed inside fruit. And they’re everywhere -- but exactly how and when these plants came to be so ubiquitous is one of the most stubborn questions...

Hank continues our exploration of animal phyla with the more complexly organized annelida and arthropoda, and a biolography on insects.

During the Cretaceous Period, dinosaurs were more diverse, more fierce, and more strange than ever. But something else was happening under the feet of the terrible lizards: for the first time in history, there were flowers.

Howcast - Learn how to have a more eco-friendly menstruation with this Howcast video featuring Alegre of Green and Greener.