SciShow
This Video Game Software Helps Us Do Paleontology
The same technology that helps you rack up kills in your favorite FPS games also helps paleontologists solve million-year-old mysteries. Thanks to Dr. Anne Kort for helping us with this video!
SciShow
The Rock That's Helping Us Find the Origin of Life
Epidote might just look like a pretty little crystal, but it has a secret. thanks to the high-pressure circumstances where it forms, we can use it to help us uncover the origins of life on our planet, and maybe even find signs of life on...
SciShow
When Did We Start Getting Cavities?
You would think that without dentists and fluoride mouthwash, early humans would have terrible teeth. But tooth decay depends on access to sugars and starches -- meaning most early humans had decent teeth up until the Agricultural...
PBS
The Extinction That Never Happened
Natural history is full of living things that were long thought to have gone extinct only to show up again, alive and well. Paleontologists have a word for these kinds of organisms: They call them Lazarus taxa.
SciShow
These Are The Coolest Fossils From 2023
It's that time of year where we round up all our favorite science discoveries of the year, and today, we're talking fossils. From a wild mosasaur with screwdriver teeth, to glittery gold fossils, and even a mammal-versus-reptile fight to...
SciShow Kids
The Ancient Animal With a Boomerang Head! | SciShow Kids
Squeaks and Jessi discover an animal with a head that reminds them of a boomerang. Its name is Diplocaulus, and they'll learn all about how that funny head helped it live a very long time ago! First Grade Next Generation Science...
SciShow
Becoming a Predator Was Hard
Animals eating other animals seems like a tale as old as time, but it's only almost that old. Predation had to evolve in the Ediacaran period -- so let's look at early almost-predators like Auroralumina, Kimberella, Ikaria, and whatever...
PBS
How Plankton Created A Bizarre Giant of the Seas
At more than 2 meters long, Aegirocassis was not only the biggest radiodont ever, but it also may have been the biggest animal in the Early Ordovician. This bizarre marine giant may have only been possible, thanks to a major revolution...
PBS
How Ankylosaurs Got Their Clubs
While clubs are practically synonymous with ankylosaurs, we’ve only started to get to the bottom of how they worked and how this unusual anatomy developed in the first place.
PBS
How a Mass Extinction Event Created the Amazon
The Amazon rainforest of South America is a paradise for flowering plants. But long ago, the landscape that we now think of as the Amazon looked very different. And would you believe that the entire revolution of the Amazon began with...
PBS
How Did Our Most Famous Ancestor Really Die?
Did our most famous fossil ancestor, Lucy, die by falling out of a tall tree? The answer is part of a decades-long debate over how, exactly, our ancestors transitioned from life in the trees to life on the ground.
PBS
How 7,000 Years of Epic Floods Changed the World (w/ SciShow!)
Strange geologic landmarks in the Pacific Northwest are the lingering remains of a mystery that took nearly half a century to solve. These features turned out to be a result one of the most powerful and bizarre episodes in geologic...
PBS
Why Male Mammoths Lost the Game (w/ TierZoo!)
Woolly mammoths, our favorite ice age proboscidean, disappeared from Europe and North America at the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. Today, we’ve teamed up with TierZoo to solve one of the mysteries about these...
PBS
Why Do Things Keep Evolving Into Crabs?
For some reason, animals keep evolving into things that look like crabs, independently, over and over again. What is it about the crab’s form that makes it so evolutionarily successful that non-crabs are apparently jealous of it?
PBS
Why Did These Ancient Gophers Have Horns?
These odd rodents belong to a genus known as Ceratogaulus, but they’re more commonly called horned gophers, because, you guessed it, they had horns. And it turns out the horns probably had a purpose - one that rodents would likely...
PBS
Where Are All The Squid Fossils?
It might surprise you but cephalopods have a pretty good fossil record, with one major exception. If squids were swimming around in the same oceans as their closest cousins, where did all the squids go?
PBS
When We Took Over the World
From our deepest origins in Africa all the way to the Americas, by looking at the fossils and archaeological materials we have been able to trace the path our ancestors took during the short window of time when we took over the world.
PBS
When We Tamed Fire
The ability to make and use fire has fundamentally changed the arc of our evolution. The bodies we have today were, in many ways, shaped by that time when we first tamed fire.
PBS
When We Met Other Human Species
We all belong to the only group of hominins on the planet today. But we weren’t always alone. 100,000 years ago, Eurasia was home to other hominin species, some of which we know our ancestors met, and spent some quality time with.
PBS
When We First Talked
The evolution of our ability to speak is its own epic saga and it’s worth pausing to appreciate that. It’s taken several million years to get to this moment where we can tell you about how it took several million years for us to get here.
Curated Video
When We First Made Tools
The tools made by our human ancestors may not seem like much when you compare them to the screen you’re looking at right now but their creation represents a pivotal moment in the origin of technology and in the evolution of our lineage.
PBS
When the Synapsids Struck Back
Synapsids were the world’s first-ever terrestrial megafauna but the vast majority of these giants were doomed to extinction. However some lived on, keeping a low profile among the dinosaurs. And now our world is the way it is because of...
Curated Video
When The "Combat Wombat" Became An Apex Predator
In Australia, evolution built a family of deadly predators by taking a group of cute, harmless herbivores and turning them murderous.
PBS
When Penguins Went From The Sky To The Sea
Today, we think of penguins as small-ish, waddling, tuxedo-birds. But they evolved from a flying ancestor, were actual giants for millions of years, and some of them were even dressed a little more casually.