The rise of the Himalayas affected more than just the immediate area. Turns out, we may have them to thank for everything from the rise of giant flightless birds in Madagascar; to the disappearance of plants from Antarctica; to the...

How and why the giraffe's neck emerged in the first place has been a mystery that generations of biologists have argued over – one that has made us reconsider our understanding of how evolution actually works over and over again.

What happened to the piece of prime prehistoric real estate known as Doggerland? While a massive megatsunami might have drowned it for good, the underlying reason that it now lies under the sea may have actually been the same thing that...

This is the story of how our planet rescued itself from extreme conditions in the Cretaceous Period, at the cost of essentially suffocating the oceans for half-a-million years.

Of course, the ancient Egyptians were probably not the first people to ever wear clothing, but we haven’t found any clothes older than the Tarkhan Dress. So how can we figure out when we first started wearing clothes? Well, it turns out...

Turns out, instead of having bats to thank for the existence of butterflies, the groups we should actually be thanking are…bees and beans.

To get fire, which exists only on Earth, it took billions of years of photosynthesis – which means fire can’t exist without life. And fire and life have been shaping each other ever since.

Tiny exoskeleton fragments may have allowed some of the most important microbes in the planet’s history to set sail out into the open ocean and change the world forever.

There was a group of hominins, those creatures more closely related to us than to chimpanzees, that did take a different, parallel journey from our ancestors. Our paths ran beside each other - and potentially even crossed at times - but...

What are animal-like fossils doing in rocks a billion years old, and what does that mean for our understanding of their evolution and geologic time itself? Turns out, there might've been a long, slow-burning fuse that ultimately ignited...

For some, the rise and spread of venomous elapids was just another challenge to adapt to. For others, it was a catastrophe of almost apocalyptic proportions. And we humans are no exception, because it seems that when elapids slithered...

We spend a lot of time here on Eons looking backwards into deep time, visiting ancient chapters of our planet’s history. But this time, we’re taking a look towards the deep future. After all, the story is far from over.

How did such a strange plant like cannabis come to be in the first place? When and where did we first domesticate it? And why oh why does it get us high?

It would take decades for paleontologists to realize that maybe there wasn’t just one so-called "cradle of humankind," and realize that maybe they’d been asking the wrong question all along.

While the eruptions of the volcanoes along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge usually don't trouble us, their birth was once responsible for ripping a supercontinent apart and creating the Atlantic Ocean that we know today.

We need to talk about the biggest break-up of all-time: the break-up of the supercontinent Pangea, and how, ultimately, when India smashed back into Asia, it traded one form of evolutionary isolation for another.

How did the "false horse," Thoatherium, and its relatives survive when their hoofed legs seemed to be adapted for an ecosystem that wouldn't exist for another 12 million years?

Long-jawed proboscideans were doing pretty well for themselves. That is, until they were all rapidly replaced with proboscideans with long, flexible trunks instead: mammoths, mastodons, and our modern elephants.What suddenly made long...

Where did our unique moon come from? It turns out that lunar rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts are a clue, pointing to the origin of our closest cosmic companion, an origin even stranger than you might imagine

Where are all the east coast dinosaurs? Why don’t we find famous species like Triceratops in Central Park? Turns out, evolution and geology came together to make the east coast into an ancient lost world of weird dinosaurs.

In 2003, a fossil belonging to a mammaliaform was discovered in an ancient lakebed in what's now China. It was an almost complete skeleton the size of a platypus, a find that complicated the history of mammaliaforms. It painted a picture...

While the evolution of the butthole was a major breakthrough in animal development, its story might actually end with redefining what it means to have a butthole at all.

What did life look like when the Amazon watershed flowed backwards? How did its direction shape the evolution of life around it? And what force could have possibly been strong enough to up-end one of the world’s mightiest rivers between...

Climbing to the summit of the Eurasian food chain was one of the Neandertals’ most impressive evolutionary feats, but in the end, it may have actually been what doomed them.