In Australia, evolution built a family of deadly predators by taking a group of cute, harmless herbivores and turning them murderous.

Lizards are incredibly widespread and diverse but it took them a long time to get to where they are now. Because they used to face some pretty stiff competition from a group of lizard look-alikes.

Sea scorpions thrived for 200 million years, coming in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Over time, they developed a number of adaptations--from crushing claws to flattened tails for swimming. And some of them adapted by getting so big...

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...

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.

There was a time in Earth’s history that was so stable, geologists once called it the Boring Billion. But the fact is, this period was anything but boring. In fact, it set the stage for our modern version of plate tectonics - and...

This ancient species had the same six legs and segmented body that we’d recognize from an ant today. But it also had a huge, scythe-like jaw and a horn coming out of its head. This bizarre predator belonged to a group known as “hell...

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...

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?

Scientists had no idea what type of organisms the life forms of the Ediacaran were—lichen, colonies of bacteria, fungi or something else. It turns out, the key to solving the puzzle of Precambrian life was a tiny bit of fossilized fat.

Over 600 million years ago, sheets of ice coated our planet on both land and sea. How did this happen? And most importantly for us, why did the planet eventually thaw again? The evidence for Snowball Earth is written on every continent...

In the middle of the Cambrian, life on land was about to get a little more crowded. And those newcomers would end up changing the world. The arrival of plants on land would make the world colder, drain much of the oxygen out of the...

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.

Today, chilis are the most widely cultivated spice crop in the world - grown everywhere from their native home in the Americas to Europe, Africa, and Asia. But how and why did chilis evolve this weird, fiery trick in the first place? And...

The Toba supervolcano was the biggest explosive eruption of the last 2.5 million years. And humans were around to see it, or at least feel its effects! But what were those effects?

During one of the most pivotal moments in our evolutionary story our brains actually shrank relative to our bodies.

420 million years ago, the forest floor of what's now New York was covered with a plant that didn’t look like a tree at all, except its roots were made of wood. Instead of looking up to learn about the evolution of trees, it turns out...

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...

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?

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

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....

Humanity’s drive to explore our planet is one of the defining characteristics of our species. But exploration only works if you know where you are at any given time. Not so easy when you are out at sea with no visible landmarks and the...

Visiting the Largest Bat Colony on Earth!