episodes
- 1. How our deadliest parasite turned to the dark side Around 10,000 years ago, somewhere in Africa, a microscopic parasite made a huge leap. With a little help from a mosquito, it left its animal host - probably a gorilla - and found its way to a new hos...
- 2. Primates vs Snakes (An Evolutionary Arms Race) The Snake Detection Hypothesis proposes that the ability to quickly spot and avoid snakes is deeply embedded in primates, including us - an evolutionary consequence of the danger snakes have posed to...
- 3. How the Rise of Social Insects Shrunk These Dinosaurs We often think of dinosaurs as either preying on other dinos or mammals, or as plant-eaters -- but in ecosystems today, those aren’t the only two options. So why would we expect dinosaurs to have only...
- 4. How Vertebrates Got Teeth... And Lost Them Again As revolutionary as teeth were, they would go on to disappear in some groups of vertebrates. But why?
- 5. How Horses Went From Food To Friends Do our modern horses descend from just one domesticated population, or did it happen many times, in many places? Answering these questions has been tricky, as we’ve needed to bring together evidence f...
- 6. Why We Only Have Ten Toes (It's a Long Story) Today, all mammals from humans to bats have five fingers or fewer. Yes, even whales, whose finger bones are hidden in their fins. Birds have four or fewer and amphibians get the best of both worlds, o...
- 7. Sharks nearly went extinct 19 million years ago #shorts There used to be SO MANY sharks...where did they go?
- 8. Dire wolves aren’t wolves at all #shorts Dire wolves aren’t actually wolves but what they are might be even cooler.
- 9. Could humans survive if they traveled back in time 3 billion years? #shorts Could humans survive during the Precambrian?
- 10. Some trees are more closely related to broccoli than to other trees #shorts Don’t be fooled by convergent evolution.
- 11. Human knees are the worst and we have evolution to thank for that #shorts Why do human knees suck?
- 12. A crater in Turkmenistan has been on fire for about 50 years #shorts And it’s been reported that one of the geologists started it on purpose?
- 13. When a Giant Pterosaur Ruled the European Islands The ecological niche of apex predators was empty on Hateg Island, waiting to be occupied by something large, mobile, and powerful enough to fill it.
- 14. Only one human has been excavated from the La Brea Tar Pits #shorts
- 15. Could humans survive a giant space rock colliding with Earth 66 million years ago? #shorts Would you have survived the K-Pg Impact?
- 16. The Sudden Rise of the First Colossal Animal A truly enormous ichthyosaur around the size of a modern sperm whale, reached its size within just a few million years of taking to the water - a blink of an eye in evolutionary time.
- 17. The Tasmanian tiger is definitely extinct. So why do people keep report sightings of them? #shorts Thylacines are definitely extinct!
- 18. The Extreme Hyenas That Didn't Last Hyenas weren’t always able to eat bones. In fact, only a few million years ago, they lived very different lives.
- 19. Who forged one of the most famous fake fossils of all time? #shorts
- 20. After this bird went extinct the first time, evolution just hit replay #shorts The bird that evolved twice!
- 21. Someone lost the only fossil from what might’ve been the biggest dinosaur ever #shorts
- 22. Would you have survived the biggest mass extinction of all time? #shorts
- 23. An ancient insect trapped in amber has a parasitic mushroom erupting out of it? #shorts I will pass on the parasitic mind-controlling mushroom, thanks
- 24. How the Smallest Animal Got So Simple We tend to think that evolution only goes in one direction— toward getting bigger and more advanced. But that’s not always the case. This tiny, simple animal, the Myxozoans, (yes, animal!) evolved fro...
- 25. We know a lot about dinosaurs but...what was the first dinosaur? #shorts
- 26. Why Sour May Be The Oldest Taste While sour taste's original purpose was to warn vertebrates of danger, in a few animal groups, including us, its role has reversed. The taste of danger became something it was dangerous for us to avoi...
- 27. The Ancient Human Species With A Missing Body Only a handful of Denisovan fossils have been identified. In the absence of actual body fossils, it’s impossible for us to reconstruct their morphology, right?
- 28. Are there dinosaur fossils in space? #shorts
- 29. Why don’t rabbits get really, really big? #shorts
- 30. An extinct human species was discovered deep within a cave system #shorts
- 31. When Ants Domesticated Fungi While we’ve been farming for around 10,000 to 12,000 years, the ancestors of ants have been doing it for around 60 million years. So when, and how, and why did ants start … farming?
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32.
The Curious Case of the Cave Lion
A mysterious, large feline roamed Eurasia during the last ice age. Its fossils have been found across the continent, and it’s been the subject of ancient artwork. So what exactly were these big cats?
- 33. Is This The Oldest Dad In The Fossil Record? Fossil evidence suggests Diictodon used burrows to breed, and that a parent stayed behind to feed and protect their young. And the parent that stayed behind? It might’ve been the male.
- 34. Why did so many predators die at the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry? #shorts There’s something weird going on at the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry in what’s now Utah.
- 35. What is the most successful human species? #shorts Does Homo erectus beat out Homo sapiens?
- 36. Sharks have antibacterial skin. Can we use that to save lives? #shorts Sometimes modern problems require ancient, evolutionary solutions.
- 37. This Ice Age pup's last meal was a woolly rhino #shorts What was this ancient pup’s last meal?
- 38. What came first, the sabertooth or the cat? #shorts The newest oldest saber-toothed mammal
- 39. How To Build A Woolly Mammoth (But Should We?) In the quest to understand how evolution basically built the woolly mammoth, we may have found the blueprints for building them ourselves.
- 40. Something Has Been Making This Mark For 500 Million Years Paleodictyon, a hexagonal-patterned fossil, is a bit of a mystery. We don’t even know if it’s a trace fossil, or the organism itself. So… what could it be?
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41.
Giant Viruses Blur The Line Between Alive and Not
In 2003, microbiologists made a huge discovery. One that would force us to reconsider a lot of what we thought we knew about the evolution of microbial life: giant viruses.
- 42. This new giant bacterium is visible to the naked eye #shorts Microbiology goes macro with a new giant bacterium!
- 43. Another Spinosaurus study, another opportunity to debate if Spinosaurus was aquatic #shorts Spinosaurus had dense bones!
- 44. There were dinosaurs with basically no arms at all, just hands! #shorts Guemesia: a new no-arm dino
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45.
When Giant Millipedes Reigned
This giant millipede was the largest known invertebrate to ever live on land. So how did it get so big??
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46.
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.
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47.
Why Does Caffeine Exist?
Today, billions of people around the world start their day with caffeine. But how and why did the ability to produce this molecule independently evolve in multiple, distantly-related lineages of flowe...
- 48. This was the biggest earthquake humans ever experienced #shorts One of the biggest earthquakes humans ever experienced happened around 3800 years ago in what's now northern Chile.
- 49. Someone stole two of the most important documents in the history of science #shorts We have no idea where they were all this time, or who stole and returned them and why.
- 50. You can thank evolution for flesh-eating bees #shorts Flesh-eating bees exist!
- 51. This is one of the oldest art workshops ever discovered! #shorts Archaeologists have discovered an ancient art workshop
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52.
Did An Ancient Pathogen Reshape Our Cells?
There is one - and only one - group of mammals that doesn’t have alpha-gal: the catarrhine primates, which are the monkeys of Africa and Asia, the apes, and us.
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53.
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 with...
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54.
The Fungi That Turned Ants Into Zombies
This fungus was actually manipulating ants’ movements, forcing them to do something they’d never ordinarily do, something strange, yet specific…
- 55. Did you know that fossils can get sick? #shorts Did you know that fossils can get sick? – Specifically with Pyrite Disease
- 56. A supervolcano in Idaho once caused a disaster 900 miles away. #shorts Disaster in the great plains!
- 57. A bunch of very important fossils disappeared during WWII. #shorts 80 years ago, a bunch of fossils of ancient humans disappeared.
- 58. Did this animal poop cubes? Giant cubes? #shorts Congrats! You just found a wombat burrow. And the cubes are its poop.
- 59. Are wisdom teeth a problem for us because of evolution? Or because of our development? #shorts Wisdom teeth can be such a pain
- 60. Our extinct relative was an ancient leopard’s lunch. #shorts Paranthropus got chomped by a leopard
- 61. When did we start wearing clothes? #shorts We didn’t always wear clothes!
- 62. Did Megalodon go after whale faces specifically? #shorts Ancient sperm whale heads belonged on every shark-cuterie board
- 63. Where Did Water Come From? Mercury, Venus, and Mars are all super low on water – so where did ours come from and why do we have so much of it? We think our water came from a few unlikely sources: meteorites, space dust, and eve...
- 64. Our Ancient Relative That Said 'No Thanks' To Life On Land Around the time that some of our fishapod relatives were crawling out of the water, others were turning around and diving right back in.
- 65. Imagine a cat's mouth fully covering up their saber teeth. #shorts We might’ve been wrong about how this saber-toothed cat looked
- 66. Darwin correctly predicted an animal existed without ever seeing it. #shorts Sometimes evolution is completely predictable.
- 67. Neandertals weren’t dumb cavemen. In lots of ways, they were just like us. #shorts Shanidar 1 got by with a little help from his friends
- 68. Here are two ways to get a fossil species named after you. #shorts Here are two ways to get a fossil species named after you.