Climbing 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.

It's a hard world out there, especially for a little guy. So what's a soft-bodied animal to do? Turns out that marine invertebrates basically figured out the best defense system of all time, and nobody's a better demonstration of that...

Today we're talking about the biggest snakes that ever lived -- like anacondas, pythons, and Titanoboa -- and how they evolved to be so big in the first place. Hosted by: Savannah Geary (they/them)

Plenty of animals do things that seem risky, but they clearly have a good reason for doing it. After all, they've made it this far by taking chances. But these birds really take the cake when it comes to daredevil stunts, all in the name...

Plants may not seem like they’re doing much, but if you look closer, you’ll find a whole world just lurking beyond the surface. We’re talking chemical defenses, highways, and even ways to change the weather. In this episode, we’ll learn...

A world without predators. It sounds like a safer, happier world, but come on, this is science…

Many crustaceans from all sorts of starting points evolve to end up looking similar, likely due to outside pressures. That’s sort of like what happens with YouTube videos.

Are These Butterflies The Same?

In this episode, Jessi and Squeaks explore the many ways that caterpillars use to avoid being munched on by predators, and that it often comes down to how they look!

So we know that humans are pretty good at making fires, but how long have we been barbecue pit masters? Turns out the evidence is hardly a smoking gun.

Soon after whaling ships began operating in the North Pacific, an interesting trend emerged. Within just a few years, whalers saw a 58% drop in their successful strikes. Sperm whales had suddenly become harder to kill— they had begun...

Join Squeaks as he learns about some of the most colorful animals ever: poison dart frogs! Some animals are bright and colorful to warn other animals that they might be dangerous... and some are just copycats. First Grade Next Generation...

Animals eating other animals seems like a tale as old as time, but it's only almost that old. Predation had to evolve in the Ediacaran period -- so let's look at early almost-predators like Auroralumina, Kimberella, Ikaria, and whatever...

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?

In Australia, evolution built a family of deadly predators by taking a group of cute, harmless herbivores and turning them murderous.

The marine reptiles Ichthyosaurs arose after The Great Dying, which wiped out at least 90 percent of life in the oceans, changing the seas forever and triggering a new evolutionary arms race between predator and prey.

The mammoths fossils found on the Channel Islands off the coast of southern California are much smaller than their relatives found on the mainland. They were so small that they came to be seen as their own species. How did they get...

Back in the late Miocene epoch, there was an island--or maybe a group of islands-- in the Mediterranean Sea that was populated with fantastic giant beasts. It’s a lesson in the very strange, but very real, powers of natural selection.

Around 30 million years ago, a new group of predators began to push nautiloids from their former global range into a single remaining refuge. But who were these predators?

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

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.

20 million years ago, the ocean housed a creature so colossal that its stomach could reach volumes of almost 10,000 liters— big enough to fit an entire orca. It was the megalodon, the biggest shark to ever live. So, what was it like when...

Ladybugs are red with black spots, right? Well, not always. There's a lot of genetic and evolutionary reasons that they can be different colors with wacky patterns.

Although they don’t seem like the talkative type, recent research suggests that bird eggs can use vibrations to relay warnings about the outside world to their nest-mates.