In 1977, a farmer was plowing his field on a plateau high in the Andes mountains when he stumbled upon a giant fossilized skeleton. How did this giant marine reptile end up high in the Andes Mountains?

We can track our history of eating just about anything back through the fossil record and see the impact it’s had on our evolution. Throughout time, part of the secret to our success as a species has been our early - and sometimes fatal...

It arose from rhino ancestors that were a lot smaller, but Paraceratherium would take a different evolutionary path. Believe it or not, it actually became so big that it probably got close to what scientists think might be the actual...

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...

What’s the real story of the dodo? How did such a unique bird even evolve in the first place? And are we really responsible for its extinction?

In 1964, a paleontologist named John Ostrom unearthed some fascinating fossils from the mudstone of Montana. Its discovery set the stage for what’s known today as the Dinosaur Renaissance, a total re-thinking of what we thought we knew...

Our DNA holds evidence of a huge, ancient pandemic, one that touched many different species, spanned the globe, and lasted for more than 15 million years.

To figure out how Thrinaxodon and Broomistega became entombed together, scientists looked at the burrow itself, along with their fossilized bones. And it looks like their luck ran out, when a behavior that usually would’ve helped them...

The Wrangel Island mammoths would end up being the final survivors of a once-widespread genus. In their final years, after having thrived in many parts of the world for millions of years, the very last mammoths that ever lived...

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...

How does a bear -- which is a member of the order Carnivora -- evolve into an herbivore? Despite how it looks, nothing about the history of the giant panda is black and white.

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

In order to understand where hearts came from, we have to go back to the earliest common ancestor of everything that has a heart. It took hundreds of millions of years, and countless different iterations of the same basic structure to...

Toxodon was one of the last members of a lineage that vanished 11,000 years ago after thriving in isolation for millions of years. And its fossils would inspire a revolutionary thinker to tackle a bigger mystery than Toxodon itself:...

Untangling the origins of Beelzebufo -- the giant frog that lived alongside the dinosaurs -- turns out to be one of the most bedeviling problems in the history of amphibians.

Only a handful of Denisovan fossils have been identified. In the absence of actual body fossils, it’s impossible for us to reconstruct their morphology, right?

Paleontologists found a small theropod dinosaur skull right on top of a nest of eggs that were believed to belong to a plant-eating dinosaur. Instead of being the nest robbers that they were originally thought to be, raptors like this...

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.

This video contains images and video of snakes and spiders. It's possible Euchambersia possessed venom about 20 million years before the first lizards and over 150 million years before the first snakes evolved. We’ve teamed up Sarah...

Around the time that some of our fishapod relatives were crawling out of the water, others were turning around and diving right back in.

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?

A 9,500-year-old burial in Cyprus represents some of the oldest known evidence of human/cat companionships anywhere in the world. But when did this close relationship between humans and cats start? And how did humans help cats take over...

As revolutionary as teeth were, they would go on to disappear in some groups of vertebrates. But why?

The rise and fall of ancient walruses, and how modern ones got their tusks, is a story that spans almost 20 million years. And while there are parts of the story that we’re still trying to figure out, it looks like tusks didn’t have...