They have survived every catastrophe and every mass extinction event that nature has thrown at them. And by being the little, filter-feeding, water-cleaning creatures that they are, sponges may have saved the world.

It looks like the evolution of ocean-going whales like Borealodon may have affected communities found in the deep ocean, like the ones found around geothermal vents. And it turns out that when a whale dies, that’s just the beginning of...

At Tanque Loma, at least 22 giant ground sloths in the genus Eremotherium met their end. Of the five hypotheses that researchers proposed for what killed the sloths, the best supported one right now is that they died surrounded by their...

The Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse set the stage for a takeover that would be a crucial turning point in the history of terrestrial animal life. If it weren’t for that time when the rainforests collapsed - in an extinction event that...

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...

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.

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...

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...

People have been discovering the traces and remains of prehistoric creatures for thousands of years. And they’ve also probably been telling stories about fantastic beasts since language became a thing. So, is it possible that the...

Blood is one of the most revolutionary features in our evolutionary history. Over hundreds of millions of years, the way in which blood does its job has changed over and over again. As a result, we animals have our familiar red blood....

Teeth are so well preserved in the fossil record that they make the best, most informative fossils we can find, from phylogenetic studies to learning about the evolution of the human brain.

We know what the dinosaurs looked like thanks to fossils, but have you seen some of these wild creatures? Join Michael Aranda for a new episode of SciShow and take a closer look at some of the strangest-looking animals evolution has...

Snakes have two penises (aka hemipenes) that come in a diverse array of shapes and sizes. And they could owe it all to their lack of legs.

Everywhere in the animal kingdom you can find teeth in all sorts of shapes and sizes, so you probably think you have a pretty good idea where they came from. But in reality, this debate is still a hot one, and it may have something to do...

Nowadays, we're pretty confident about how the dinosaurs died out, but there are still other extinctions throughout Earth's history, some big, some small, that remain unsolved.

When it comes to mass extinctions, you probably imagine giant volcanic eruptions or asteroids raining fire from the sky, but sometimes these events can have some unexpected causes. Hosted by: Michael Aranda

You probably don't consider algae to be super aggressive, but 66 million years ago had to turn to murder in order to survive.

Want to learn more about the topic in this week's video? Here are some keywords/phrases to get your googling started: - Mass Extinction Event: a significant, global decrease in the diversity of life - "Big 5": The five biggest mass...

A huge and diverse subfamily of dogs, the bone-crushers patrolled North America for more than thirty million years, before they disappeared in the not-too-distant past. So what happened to the biggest dogs that ever lived?

All humans share some common bits of DNA, passed down to us from our African ancestors. Geneticist Spencer Wells talks about how his Genographic Project will use this shared DNA to figure out how we are -- in all our diversity -- truly...

Hank squares off against the host of SciShow Kids, Jessi Knudsen Castaneda, to match wits about chemistry, evolution, and how babies are weird!

This is not a Game of Thrones fan fiction episode. Dire wolves were real! And thousands of them died in the same spot in California. Their remains have taught us volumes about how they lived, hunted, died and way more about any animal's...

Nowadays, we're pretty confident about how the dinosaurs died out, but there are still other extinctions throughout Earth's history, some big, some small, that remain unsolved.