Before the start of the Eocene Epoch about 56 million years ago--Antarctica was still joined to both Australia and South America. And it turns out that a lot of what we recognize about the southern hemisphere can be traced back to that...

How the therizinosaurs lived and evolved ended up being just as weird as their mixed-up anatomy.

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...

As more and more fossil ancestors have been found, our genus has become more and more inclusive, incorporating more members that look less like us, Homo sapiens. By getting to know these other hominins--the ones who came before us--we...

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...

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?

The story of how the starfish got its arms reminds us that even animals that might be familiar to us today can have incredibly deep histories - ones that stretch back almost half a billion years.

The story of the egg spans millions of years, from the first vertebrates that dared to venture onto land to today’s mammals, including the platypus, and of course birds. Like chickens? We’re here to tell you: The egg came first.

When pterosaurs first took flight, you could say that it marked the beginning of the end for the winged reptiles. Because, strangely enough, the power of flight -- and the changes that it led to -- may have ultimately led to their downfall.

Lots of the traits we think of as defining us as mammals show up pretty early, during the time of the dinosaurs. And, in some cases, they show up a lot earlier and in things that weren’t mammals at all.

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...

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...

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.

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

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?

How did seahorses — one of the ocean’s worst swimmers — spread around the globe? And where did they come from in the first place?

SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 are nasty enemies. Invisible, mysterious, and deadly, they have spread around the world and caused much of humanity to hide away. Germs like these only succeed and spread because of our social evolution, and our...

What is ”egg-shaped” even? I used to think it was the shape of a chicken egg. Then one day I saw a collection of eggs from lots of different bird species, and I realized just how many different kind of egg shapes there really are! I had...

The word "sustainability" gets thrown around a lot these days. But what does it actually mean for humanity to be sustainable? Environmental data scientist Hannah Ritchie digs into the numbers behind human progress across centuries,...

This week, researches published a genetic analysis of the 11,500-year-old remains of a baby found in Alaska, near where the first Americans crossed the Bering land bridge. That analysis has answered some lingering questions about human...

Lizards tend to scurry around in short bursts rather than running long distances, and the reason why might be nearly as old as life on land. Hosted by: Stefan Chin

Is there a chance that more species may actually be closer to fish than we originally thought?

According to the fossil record, ancient humans usually had straight teeth, complete with wisdom teeth. In fact, the dental dilemmas that fuel the demand for braces and wisdom teeth extractions today appear to be recent developments. So,...