episodes
- 1. How Two Microbes Changed History What if I told you that, more than two billion years ago, some tiny living thing started to live inside another living thing … and never left? And now, the descendants of both of those things are in y...
- 2. The Time Terror Birds Invaded About 5 million years ago, a new predator made its way from the south and onto the coastal plains of North America. It was a giant, flightless, carnivorous bird and came to be known by one of the cool...
- 3. Untangling the Devil's Corkscrew In the late 1800s, paleontologists in Nebraska found huge coils of hardened sand stuck deep in the earth. Local ranchers called them Devil's Corkscrews and scientists called them Daemonelix. It was cl...
- 4. The Great Snake Debate 90 million years ago, an ancient snake known as Najash had...legs. It is by no means the only snake to have limbs either. But what’s even stranger: we’re not at all sure where it came from.
- 5. The Whole Saga of the Supercontinents The study of natural history is the study of how the world has changed but Earth itself is in a constant state of flux -- because the ground beneath your feet is always moving. So if we want to know h...
- 6. From the Cambrian Explosion to the Great Dying The first era of our current eon, the Paleozoic Era, is probably the most deceptively fascinating time in Earth’s history. With near constant revolutions in life, punctuated by catastrophic extinction...
- 7. How Sex Became a Thing We don’t know which living thing was the very first to arrive at the totally revolutionary process that is sexual reproduction but we can follow the history of how (and why) sex became a thing.
- 8. The Other Explosion You Should Know About Fossils found around the world suggest that multi-cellular life was not only present before the Cambrian Explosion, it was much more elaborate and diverse than anyone thought. This is the story of the...
- 9. How the Turtle Got Its Shell Where did turtles come from? And how did the they get their shells? The answers to these questions would eventually cause scientists to rethink the entire history of reptile evolution.
- 10. What a Dinosaur Looks Like Under a Microscope We traveled to Bozeman, Montana to meet with Dr. Ellen-Thérèse Lamm who explores ancient life by studying it at the cellular level. Kallie and Dr. Lamm discuss how she does this, and what she’s learne...
- 11. The Most Useful Fossils in the World For decades, one of the most abundant kinds of fossils on Earth, numbering in the millions of specimens, was a mystery to paleontologists. But geologists discovered that these mysterious fossils could...
- 12. Inside the Dinosaur Library We're back in Bozeman, Montana this week talking to Amy Atwater, Collections Manager at the Museum of the Rockies. MOR has among the largest collections of North American dinosaurs in the United State...
- 13. What Was the Ancestor of Everything? The search for our origins go back to a single common ancestor -- one that remains shrouded in mystery. It’s the ancestor of everything we know and today scientists call it the last universal common a...
- 14. How the Squid Lost Its Shell The ancestors of modern, squishy cephalopods like the octopus and the squid all had shells. In ancient times, their shell was their greatest asset but it eventually proved to be their biggest weakness...
- 15. How the Chalicothere Split In Two Two extinct relatives of horses and rhinos are closely related to each other but have strikingly different body plans. How did two of the same kind of animal, living in the same place, end up looking...
- 16. The Age of Reptiles in Three Acts Reptiles emerged from the Paleozoic as humble creatures, but in time, they grew to become some of the largest forms of life ever to stomp, swim, and soar across the planet. This Age of Reptiles was a...
- 17. The Weird, Watery Tale of Spinosaurus In 1912, a fossil collector discovered some strange bone fragments in the eerie, beautiful Cretaceous Bahariya rock formation of Egypt. Eventually, that handful of fossil fragments would reveal to sci...
- 18. From the Fall of Dinos to the Rise of Humans After taking you on a journey through geologic time, we've arrived at the Cenozoic Era. Most of the mammals and birds that you can think of appeared during this era but perhaps more importantly, the C...
- 19. That Time It Rained for Two Million Years At the beginning of the Triassic Period, with the continents locked together from pole-to-pole in the supercontinent of Pangea, the world is hot, flat, and very, very dry. But then 234 million years a...
- 20. Why Triassic Animals Were Just the Weirdest The Triassic was full of creatures that look a lot like other, more modern species, even though they’re not closely related at all. The reason for this has to do with how evolution works and with the...
- 21. Where Did Viruses Come From? There are fossils of viruses, of sorts, preserved in the DNA of the hosts that they’ve infected. Including you. This molecular fossil trail can help us understand where viruses came from, how they evo...
- 22. When Fish First Breathed Air 385 million years ago, a group of fish would undertake one of the most important journeys in the history of life and become the first vertebrates to live on dry ground. But first, they had to acquire...
- 23. How the T-Rex Lost Its Arms Tyrannosaurus rex was big, Tyrannosaurus rex was vicious, and Tyrannosaurus rex had tiny arms. The story of how T-Rex lost its arms is, itself, pretty simple. But the story of why it kept those little...
- 24. FAQs From Our First Year Over the first season of PBS Eons, we’ve explored the history of Earth from the very origins of life right up to the Cenozoic Era that we’re in now. To celebrate our first anniversary together, we’d l...
- 25. When Insects First Flew Insects were the first animals to ever develop the ability to fly, and, arguably, they did it the best. But this development was so unusual that scientists are still/working on, and arguing about, how...
- 26. The Mystery of the Eocene’s Lethal Lake In 1800s, miners began working in exposed deposits of mud near the town of Messel, Germany. They were extracting oil from the rock and along with the oil, they found beautifully preserved fossils of a...
- 27. When Fish Wore Armor 420 million years ago, some fish were more medieval. They wore armor, sometimes made of big plates, and sometimes made of interlocking scales. But that armor may actually have served a totally differe...
- 28. When Birds Had Teeth Experts are still arguing over whether Archaeopteryx was a true bird, or a paravian dinosaur, or some other kind of dino. But regardless of what side you’re on, how did this fascinating, bird-like ani...
- 29. How Horses Took Over North America (Twice) The ancestors of modern horses became so successful that they spread all over the world, to Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa. But in their native range of North America, they’ll vanish for 10,0...
- 30. How a Supervolcano Made the Cenozoic’s Coolest Fossils One of the most dynamic, transformative, and potentially dangerous features in North America is also responsible for some of the continent’s most amazing fossil deposits. It’s a supervolcano we now ca...
- 31. The Rise and Fall of the Bone-Crushing Dogs A huge and diverse subfamily of dogs, the bone-crushers patrolled North America for more than thirty million years, before they disappeared in the not-too-distant past. So what happened to the biggest...
- 32. Life, Sex & Death Among the Dire Wolves This is not a Game of Thrones fan fiction episode. Dire wolves were real! And thousands of them died in the same spot in California. Their remains have taught us volumes about how they lived, hunted,...
- 33. When We First Walked Fossilized footprints have proved that human ancestors were already striding across the landscape 3.6 million years ago. But who started them on that path? What species pioneered this style of locomot...
- 34. Did Raptorex Really Exist? Paleontologists have been studying and drawing totally different conclusions about the fossil LH PV18 for almost a decade. Is it just one of many specimens of a theropod called Tarbosaurus bataar or i...
- 35. Can We Get DNA From Fossils? In 1993, scientists cracked open a piece of amber, took out the body of an ancient weevil, and sampled its DNA. Or, at least, so we thought. It took another few decades of research, and a lot of take-...
- 36. When Giant Amphibians Reigned Temnospondyls were a huge group of amphibians that existed for 210 million years. And calling them ‘diverse’ would be putting it mildly. Yet in the end, two major threats would push them to extinction...
- 37. Your Place in the Primate Family Tree Purgatorius, a kind of mammal called a plesiadapiform, might’ve been one of your earliest ancestors. But how did we get from a mouse-sized creature that looked more like a squirrel than a monkey -- to...
- 38. The Two People We're All Related To Due to an odd quirk of genetics and some unique evolutionary circumstances, two humans who lived at different times in the distant past managed to pass on a very small fraction of their genomes to you...
- 39. When Rodents Rafted Across the Ocean The best evidence we have suggests that, while Caviomorpha originated in South America, they came from ancestors in Africa, over 40 million years ago. So how did they get there?
- 40. When Birds Stopped Flying Ratites have spread to Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and South America. And there are fossils of Ratites in Europe, Asia, and North America too. That’s a lot of ground to cover for birds that can’t...
- 41. When Camels Roamed North America Camels are famous for adaptations that have allowed them to flourish where most other large mammals would perish. But their story begins over 40 million years ago in North America, and in an environme...
- 42. How Sloths Went From the Seas to the Trees The story of sloths is one of astounding ecological variability, with some foraging in the seas, others living underground, and others still hiding from predators in towering cliffs. So why are their...
- 43. When Sharks Swam the Great Plains If you’ve ever been to, or lived in, or even flown over the central swath of North America, then you’ve seen the remnants of what was a uniquely fascinating environment. Scientists call it the Western...
- 44. When Apes Conquered Europe Today, our closest evolutionary relatives, the apes, live only in small pockets of Africa and Asia. But back in the Miocene epoch, apes occupied all of Europe. Why aren’t there wild apes in Europe tod...
- 45. Why Megalodon (Definitely) Went Extinct For more than 10 million years, Megalodon was at the top of its game as the oceans’ apex predator...until 2.6 million years ago, when it went extinct. So, what happened to the largest shark in history...