We know that fossils are fragile, and volcanoes are destructive. So you wouldn't think that volcanoes are really any help when preserving fossils... but you'd be wrong! From the Laetoli Footprints to the Blue Lake Rhino, here are five...

From an Australian fire that's been continually burning for millennia, to earthquakes that shake the ground for centuries, here are four natural disasters that lasted way longer than you might have expected.

In this collection of classic MinuteEarth videos, we keep score on the winners and losers of the animal kingdom.



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00 - Intro

0:10 - Why Only Some Monkey
s Have Awesome...

Join us as we take a look at Australia from space and on the ground to learn about the land itself and the animals that live there!<b<br/>r/>

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Squeaks and Jessi have been having fun learning all about Australia. Squeaks wants to know more about marsupials, the special group of animals that lives almost nowhere else. So Jessi introduces him to a...

Mountain ranges usually don't form in the middle of continents. Except for the Rocky Mountains. We'll go into the baffling Laramide Orogeny and a few possible reasons why the Rockies might be in the wrong place.

Woolly mammoths, our favorite ice age proboscidean, disappeared from Europe and North America at the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. Today, we’ve teamed up with TierZoo to solve one of the mysteries about these...

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...

From our deepest origins in Africa all the way to the Americas, by looking at the fossils and archaeological materials we have been able to trace the path our ancestors took during the short window of time when we took over the world.

These hyaenodonts gave the world some of its largest terrestrial, carnivorous mammals ever known. And while these behemoths were the apex predators of their time, they were no match for a changing world.

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.

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

The short-faced bears turned out to be remarkably adaptable, undergoing radical changes to meet the demands of two changing continents. And yet, for reasons we don’t quite understand, their adaptability wasn’t enough to keep them from...

The California condor is the biggest flying bird in North America, a title that it has held since the Late Pleistocene Epoch. It's just one example of an organism that we share the planet with today that seems lost in time, out of place...

Because of their strange combination of bear-like and dog-like traits, they’re sometimes confusingly called the beardogs. And even though you’ve never met one of these animals, the beardogs are key to understanding the history of an...

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...

How is it possible to have cataclysmic eruptions without any real cataclysm?

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.

Charles Darwin encountered a tiny fox-like creature during his famous voyage but instead of discovering its fascinating evolutionary story, he just knocked it on the head with his geology hammer.

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...

Despite the name, we don’t know where the so-called “hell pigs” belong in the mammalian family tree. They walked on hooves, like pigs do, but had longer legs, almost like deer. They had hunched backs, a bit like rhinos or bison. But as...

All of today’s big cat species evolved less than 11 million years ago and yet their evolutionary history remains an almost total mystery. But scientists have recently discovered a major clue about the origins of the big cats, one that...

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?

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.