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...

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...

How did ants take over the world? Well, it looks like they didn’t achieve world domination all by themselves. They may have just been riding the wave of a totally different evolutionary explosion.

Around 6,000 years ago, in the Sahel region of Africa, a lone female mosquito buzzed through the lush, green savannah. She couldn’t know it, but the planet itself was about to change in ways that would see her descendants evolve to live...

The journey the thunder beasts took to reach such mega proportions from such humble beginnings forces us to ask an important question, one that paleontologists have been asking for more than a century: from an evolutionary perspective,...

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...

While we think we know a lot about dinosaurs – like how they moved and what they ate – for a long time, we haven’t been able to ID one seemingly basic thing about their biology... Which are males and which are females?

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...

When did practicing medicine - in its varied, complex forms (from sharing medicinal plants to the earliest surgeries) - become something that we actually started doing? While it’s a hard question to answer, it’s possible that our...

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.

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

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.

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.

We may have planet-shattering asteroids to thank for the origin of life on Earth.

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...

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...