PBS
How Whale Evolution Kind Of Sucked
Mystacodon is the earliest known mysticete, the group that, today, we call the baleen whales. But if this was a baleen whale, where was its baleen? Where did baleen come from? And how did it live without it?
PBS
How We Identified One of Earth’s Earliest Animals
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.
PBS
How We Figured Out Fermentation
Thanks to a recent adaptation, instead of getting sick from the boozy, fermented fruits, one of our primate ancestors could digest them safely, and get more calories at the same time. This new superpower would open up a whole new...
PBS
How Volcanoes Froze the Earth (Twice)
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...
PBS
How To Survive the Little Ice Age
Nunalleq, a village in what’s today southwest Alaska, seemed to have thrived during the Little Ice Age. How did this village manage to survive and prosper during this time period? And what caused this period of climate change in the...
PBS
How the Starfish Got Its Arms
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.
PBS
How the Egg Came First
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.
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How the Andes Mountains Might Have Killed a Bunch of Whales
At a site known as Cerro Ballena or Whale Hill, there are more than 40 skeletons of marine mammals -- a graveyard of ocean life dating back 6.5 million to 9 million years ago, in the Late Miocene Epoch. But the identity of the killer...
PBS
How South America Made the Marsupials
Throughout the Cenozoic Era -- the era we’re in now -- marsupials and their metatherian relatives flourished all over South America, filling all kinds of ecological niches and radiating into forms that still thrive on other continents.
PBS
How Pterosaurs Got Their Wings
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.
PBS
How Pollination Got Going Twice
The world of the Jurassic was a lot like ours - similar interactions between plants and insects were happening, but the players have changed over time. Because it looks like pollination by insects actually got going twice.
PBS
How Plate Tectonics Transformed Los Angeles
Despite the profound changes we’ve made here in recent history, the epic saga of Los Angeles' natural history is still visible - and even striking - if you know where and how to look for it.
PBS
How Plants Caused the First Mass Extinction
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...
PBS
How Plants Became Carnivores
How and why does botanical carnivory keep evolving? It turns out that when any of the basic things that most plants need aren’t there, some plants can adapt in unexpected ways to make sure they thrive.
PBS
How Humans Lost Their Fur
We’re the only primate without a coat of thick fur. It turns out that this small change in our appearance has had huge consequences for our ability to regulate our body temperature, and ultimately, it helped shape the evolution of our...
PBS
How Humans Became (Mostly) Right-Handed
No other placental mammal that we know of prefers one side of the body so consistently, not even our closest primate relatives. But being right-handed may have deep evolutionary roots in our lineage. And yet, being a leftie does seem to...
PBS
How Evolution Works (And How We Figured It Out)
As a scientific concept, evolution was revolutionary when it was first introduced. With the help of all three of our hosts and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s new Deep Time Hall, we’ll try to explain how evolution...
PBS
How Earth's First, Unkillable Animals Saved the World
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.
PBS
How Dogs (Eventually) Became Our Best Friends
We’re still figuring out the details, but most scientists agree that it took thousands of years of interactions to develop our deep bond with dogs. When did they first become domesticated? Where did this happen? And what did the process...
PBS
How Dinosaurs Coupled Up
Dinosaur mating behavior has been the subject of a lot of speculation, but what can we actually say about it from the fossil record?
PBS
How Chilis Got Spicy (and Why We Love the Burn)
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...
PBS
How Ancient Whales May Have Changed the Deep Ocean
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...
PBS
How Ancient Art Captured Australian Megafauna
Beneath layers of rock art are drawings of animals SO strange that, for a long time, some anthropologists thought they could only have been imagined. But what if these animals really had existed, after all?
PBS
How a Supervolcano Ignited an Evolutionary Debate
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?