Soviet agronomist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was obsessed with plants. Especially finding out where domesticated crops first came from. And out of his research came a proposal that certain crops, like rye and oats, were evolutionary...

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 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...

Life’s been around on Earth for at least 3.7 billion years. But for most of that time, it was incredibly boring — just simple little cells squirming around in water. It only got interesting in the last few hundred million years. And that...

We all know Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, right? Natural selection? But what about his lesser-know theory of evolution: sexual selection. Let’s talk about how animals like peacocks, whose eye-catching physical traits make them...

Camouflage is nature’s ultimate game of hide-and-seek, and the secret to winning this game is all in the brain. By studying the masters of disguise, we can see how they trick the brain to make themselves invisible — and what this can...

This is one of the weirdest mysteries of human evolution: Why do we have grandmas? From menopause to our slow maturation and super-long lifespans, humans are quite unique in the animal kingdom. Could grandma be an evolutionary secret...

Crocodiles, and birds, and dinosaurs—oh my! While classifying organisms is nothing new, phylogeny— or, grouping organisms by their evolutionary relationships—is helping us see life in a whole new light. In this episode of Crash Course...

There are lots of ways that evolution happens, and natural selection is just one of them. In this episode of Crash Course Biology, we’ll find out how this process works and shapes traits in all living things —from ginkgo trees to howler...

Whether we’re talking about tigers, trees, or tarantulas, evolution happens at the level of the population. In this episode of Crash Course Biology, we’ll find out how natural selection, gene flow, genetic drift, and other processes...

Explore the concept of biological evolution with the Amoeba Sisters! This video mentions a few misconceptions about biological evolution before providing a general definition. Then this video provides a description of four different...

Evolution vs Natural Selection

Do new traits in evolution happen slowly, or all at once? Two new studies in the journal Science may finally help us solve this mystery.

The bubonic plague killed so many people in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa that that natural selection event is still rippling through our genomes today. But the same genes that helped your ancestors survive the Black Death...

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.

Physicists have been struggling for some time to figure out why our universe is so comfy. Why, for example, are the fundamental constants - like the mass of the electron or the strength of the forces - just right for the emergence of...

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?

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They may not look like much, but beneath that shell lies an evolutionary mystery - one that stumped the biggest names in natural history for over a hundred years.

Our DNA holds thousands of dead genes and we’ve only just begun to unravel their stories. But one thing is already clear: we’re not just defined by the genes that we’ve gained over the course of our evolution, but also by the genes that...

In the search for the genes that make us human, some of the most important answers were hiding not in the genes themselves, but in what was once considered genomic junk.

As a scientific concept, evolution was revolutionary when it was first introduced. With the help of all three of our hosts and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s new Deep Time Hall, we’ll try to explain how evolution...

They have survived every catastrophe and every mass extinction event that nature has thrown at them. And by being the little, filter-feeding, water-cleaning creatures that they are, sponges may have saved the world.

Charles Darwin encountered a tiny fox-like creature during his famous voyage but instead of discovering its fascinating evolutionary story, he just knocked it on the head with his geology hammer.