Plants first made their way onto land at least 470 million years ago but for their first 80 million years, leaves as we know them today didn’t exist. What held them back?

Hidden in rocks once thought too old to contain complex life we may have found the animal kingdom’s oldest known predator.

They may not look like much, but beneath that shell lies an evolutionary mystery - one that stumped the biggest names in natural history for over a hundred years.

In between two of the islands of Indonesia, there’s an ancient line that is both real and…not real.

Paleontologists have been studying nodosaurs since the 1830s, but nobody had ever found a specimen like Borealopelta before. The key to its exceptional preservation was where it ended up after it died and how it got there.

The hardened residue scraped off your teeth at the dentist is called your dental calculus, and your dental calculus is the only part of your body that actually fossilizes while you’re alive! And scientists have figured out how to study &...

Dinosaur mating behavior has been the subject of a lot of speculation, but what can we actually say about it from the fossil record?

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...

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.

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.

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?

If we can see ourselves in the way our ancient cousins dealt with death…what else could we have in common?

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...

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...

You’ve seen it in the comment section before: “Climate change is natural. It’s happened before and it will keep happening”. In reality, comments like these are the newest kind of climate change denial. In this video we’re going to learn...

You’re alive right now… at least I’m pretty sure you are. But you’re not TOTALLY alive. Bits of you are always breaking down, being thrown out, and being replaced. Even right now, parts of you are dying. Some of your cells even died...

If you tried to sum up the last 150 years or so in one image, a chart of exponential growth would be a good place to start. It shows that some things change faster over time. You could apply it to life expectancy. Or compound interest....

More people have food allergies than ever before. Peanuts, tree nuts, shellfish, eggs, and even milk… the list of possibly dangerous foods seems to get longer every day. But why do some people’s bodies have deadly reactions food? And why...

The golden ratio. Some say it’s the most mythical number in the universe. Others say it underlies everything from nature’s patterns to beauty in art and design. But, like, what is it? And does the myth of the golden ratio hold up to its...

500 years before the Scientific Revolution, the mathematician Al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham spent hours in a dark room studying the light that filtered in. Not only did he revolutionize how we literally see the world, he pioneered the...

Precious metals like gold, silver, platinum, and rhodium are expensive because they're rare in Earth's crust. But are they rare in the universe? Why is it so hard to make some of the chemical elements? Where do heavy metals come from,...

Why do we see rainbows in soap bubbles? What makes an oil slick so oddly beautiful? Iridescent colors, which transform depending on the angle you look at them, are all over nature. How does physics make these shifting rainbows? We’re...

Why do spiders have 8 eyes? It’s a seemingly simple question with a surprisingly complex answer. We’ll be hanging out with some jumping spiders (the cutest of all spiders) and some jumping spider researchers to investigate how a...

How can sand, blown by the wind, form such intricate and beautiful patterns as ripples and dunes? The answer is a surprising secret of self-organization. In this video, we travel to Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado to climb the...