PBS
What Will Earth Be Like 300 Million Years From Now?
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.
PBS
The Hazy Evolutionary History of Cannabis
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?
PBS
No Single Cradle of Humankind
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.
PBS
The Second Time Sponges Took Over The World
Researchers have discovered a piece of a weird, but critical, time in the deep past…a time when the first-ever mass extinction may have turned Planet Earth into Sponge World.
PBS
When The Atlantic Ripped Open A Supercontinent
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.
PBS
When India Was An Island
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.
PBS
How The Elephant Got Its Trunk
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...
PBS
Where Did the Moon Come From?
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
PBS
How Animals Got Butts
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.
PBS
When the Amazon Flowed Backwards
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...
PBS
When Neandertals Became Apex Predators
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.
PBS
How Asteroids Set the Stage for Life on Earth
We may have planet-shattering asteroids to thank for the origin of life on Earth.
PBS
The Mystery of the Cretaceous Pompeii
Since the 1990s, paleontologists have been pulling 125-million-year-old complete dinosaur skeletons from the rocks of the Lujiatun in Northeastern China, most seemingly posed in perfect rest. This has prompted comparisons to a famous...
PBS
How Mountains Make Evolution Weird
Mountains have a unique effect on diversity, messing with our understanding of animals through time, and pretty much just making evolution weird. And they would eventually reveal something even stranger about a group of mammals even...
PBS
Why Wasn't There A Second Age of Reptiles?
An asteroid impact triggered the K-Pg mass extinction, wiping out the non-avian dinosaurs, ending the Age of Reptiles, and ushering in the Age of Mammals. But why was it the mammals who triumphed?
PBS
The Graveyard at the Center of the Earth
Scientists have been trying to solve the mystery of why plate tectonics works the way it does for over a hundred years. And they might have just uncovered a key to cracking it.
PBS
Webs vs Wings: the Arms Race of the Air
Spiders and their ancestors have been driving an arms race that began before either stepped foot onto land and resulted in the first powered flight on Earth. But how did this competition of webs versus wings drive such a massive...
PBS
When Red Pandas Roamed North America
How did a relative of the red panda end up in North America? What can this tell us about how long ago – and how many times – North America was connected to Europe and Asia?
PBS
Could This Sperm Whale Eat The Meg?
Unlike in fiction, giant whales do not emerge fully-formed from the ocean deep. So, where did Livyatan melvillei come from? How did such a large predator live? And what caused the titan to die out? The answer may lie in an appetite so...
PBS
Are All Oceans Basically Reincarnated?
This is the hundred-year tale of how an unlikely bunch of bottom-dwelling marine critters helped reveal that ocean basins are basically reincarnated every few hundred million years.
PBS
Darwin's Unexpected Final Obsession
After having solved the small matter of evolution by natural selection - becoming one of the most famous scientists in the world in the process - Charles Darwin turned his focus to a different personal obsession…
PBS
The Dinosaurs That Evolution Forgot
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.
PBS
The Dinosaurs Too Big To Be Dinosaurs
How did sauropods, uniquely large land animals, actually live, with their anatomy and physiology pushed to such extremes? Well, their unprecedented gigantism came with some equally massive costs…
PBS
Why Paleontologists Can’t Stop Fighting About Spinosaurus
What does it mean to be a “semi-aquatic” dinosaur? Was it wading in the shallows, or could it have been a skilled swimmer? Each scenario paints a very different picture of Spinosaurus, and the discovery of new fossils has paleontologists...