A frog and a mockingbird changed Paul Hawken's life, kindling a devotion to protect and restore nature. Now, as one of the world's preeminent environmentalists, he advocates for regeneration — a calling and action plan for the world to...

Squeaks and Jessi have been having fun learning all about Australia. Squeaks wants to know more about marsupials, the special group of animals that lives almost nowhere else. So Jessi introduces him to a...

Join Squeaks as he learns about some of the most colorful animals ever: poison dart frogs! Some animals are bright and colorful to warn other animals that they might be dangerous... and some are just...

Squeaks has been learning about the platypus and now he wants to learn more about where they come from. Join us as Jessi and Squeaks explore the world down under, Australia!





First Grade Next...

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...

Most humans might be right-handed, but plenty of other animals have a preferred hand (or whatever they've got instead of hands) too. The more general term is lateralization, and it's found in everything from kangaroos to octopuses.<br/>

Humans aren't the only Earth-dwelling animals to face the final frontier. Our journey to the stars has been aided by a number of different animals both yesteryear and today!

If you've ever given your pet an anti-flea and tick medicine, you may have wondered why there's not a similar drug out there for you. Here's a little dive into the history of these drugs, and why there may someday be a human-grade...

Start speaking a new language in 3 weeks with Babbel. Get up to 60% off in your subscription herer

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Tinnitus, or ringing in the ears, often...

Are there any non-human animals that take a task they don't want to do and think to themselves "Eh, I'll do it tomorrow"? Even if they know the task will be harder and/or more unpleasant by putting it off? One of our Patreon subscribers...

Hairworms, sometimes called horsehair or Gordian worms, are mind-controlling parasites with a twist. A genetic study found these nematomorph worms are missing 30% of their genome, and we don't understand how they live without genes for...

For decades, researchers thought they had a solid idea about the earliest booms in animal life. But new research might have turned off the gas on all these ideas, flipping our understanding of the Avalon explosion and the Cambrian...

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 host: us.

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?

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?

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.

Just a few thousand years ago, the island of Madagascar was inhabited by giant lemurs. How did such a diverse group of primates evolve in the first place, and how did they help shape the unique environments of Madagascar? And how did...

All told, the Arctic in the Cretaceous Period was a rough place to live, especially in winter. And yet, the fossils of many kinds of dinosaurs have been discovered there. So how were they able to survive in this harsh environment?

While dinosaurs were dominating the land, the metriorhynchids were thriving in the seas. But taking that plunge wasn’t easy because it takes a very special set of traits to fully dedicate yourself to life at sea.

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.

The California condor is the biggest flying bird in North America, a title that it has held since the Late Pleistocene Epoch. It's just one example of an organism that we share the planet with today that seems lost in time, out of place...

Because of their strange combination of bear-like and dog-like traits, they’re sometimes confusingly called the beardogs. And even though you’ve never met one of these animals, the beardogs are key to understanding the history of an...

How is it possible to have cataclysmic eruptions without any real cataclysm?

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?