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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?
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The (Ovi)Raptor That Paleontologists Got Wrong
Paleontologists found a small theropod dinosaur skull right on top of a nest of eggs that were believed to belong to a plant-eating dinosaur. Instead of being the nest robbers that they were originally thought to be, raptors like this...
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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 us over millions of years.
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Our Bizarre, Possibly Venomous, Relative
This video contains images and video of snakes and spiders. It's possible Euchambersia possessed venom about 20 million years before the first lizards and over 150 million years before the first snakes evolved. We’ve teamed up Sarah Suta...
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Our Ancient Relative That Said 'No Thanks' To 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.
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How Weasels Got Skinny
Weasels have an extreme body plan that may push the boundaries of what’s metabolically possible. So when and how did this happen? Why'd the weasels get so skinny?
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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?
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How the Walrus Got Its Tusks
The rise and fall of ancient walruses, and how modern ones got their tusks, is a story that spans almost 20 million years. And while there are parts of the story that we’re still trying to figure out, it looks like tusks didn’t have...
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How Plate Tectonics Gave Us Seahorses
How did seahorses — one of the ocean’s worst swimmers — spread around the globe? And where did they come from in the first place?
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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?
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When Mammals Only Went Out At Night
For decades, scientists believed dinosaurs were diurnal and tiny mammals were nocturnal. But as researchers have uncovered more mammalian fossils and studied the biology of different dinosaur species, they’ve found some surprising results.
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When Ichthyosaurs Led a Revolution in the Seas
The marine reptiles Ichthyosaurs arose after The Great Dying, which wiped out at least 90 percent of life in the oceans, changing the seas forever and triggering a new evolutionary arms race between predator and prey.
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When Giant Scorpions Swarmed the Seas
Sea scorpions thrived for 200 million years, coming in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Over time, they developed a number of adaptations--from crushing claws to flattened tails for swimming. And some of them adapted by getting so big...
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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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When Antarctica Was Green
Before the start of the Eocene Epoch about 56 million years ago--Antarctica was still joined to both Australia and South America. And it turns out that a lot of what we recognize about the southern hemisphere can be traced back to that...
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What Happened To Primates In North America?
Early primates not only lived in North America -- our primate family tree actually originated here! So what happened to those early relatives of ours?
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These Fossils Were Supposed To Be Impossible
Hidden in rocks once thought too old to contain complex life we may have found the animal kingdom’s oldest known predator.
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These Creatures Were Darwin's Greatest Enemy
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.
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The World Before Plate Tectonics
There was a time in Earth’s history that was so stable, geologists once called it the Boring Billion. But the fact is, this period was anything but boring. In fact, it set the stage for our modern version of plate tectonics - and...
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The Triassic Reptile With "Two Faces"
Figuring out what this creature’s face actually looked like would take paleontologists years. But understanding this weird animal can help us shine a light on at least one way for ecosystems to bounce back from even the worst mass...
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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.
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The Island of Shrinking Mammoths
The mammoths fossils found on the Channel Islands off the coast of southern California are much smaller than their relatives found on the mainland. They were so small that they came to be seen as their own species. How did they get...
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The Island of Huge Hamsters and Giant Owls
Back in the late Miocene epoch, there was an island--or maybe a group of islands-- in the Mediterranean Sea that was populated with fantastic giant beasts. It’s a lesson in the very strange, but very real, powers of natural selection.
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The Invisible Barrier Keeping Two Worlds Apart
In between two of the islands of Indonesia, there’s an ancient line that is both real and…not real.