PBS
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 host: us.
PBS
The Traits That Spawned the Age of Mammals
Lots of the traits we think of as defining us as mammals show up pretty early, during the time of the dinosaurs. And, in some cases, they show up a lot earlier and in things that weren’t mammals at all.
PBS
The 40 Million-Year-Old Ecosystem In Your Mouth
The hardened residue scraped off your teeth at the dentist is called your dental calculus, and your dental calculus is the only part of your body that actually fossilizes while you’re alive! And scientists have figured out how to study &...
PBS
The Two Viruses That We’ve Had For Millions of Years
There’s one kind of herpesvirus that’s specific to one species of primate, and each virus split off from the herpesvirus family tree when the primate split off from its own tree. But of course, humans are a special kind of primate.
PBS
The Pandemic That Lasted 15 Million Years
Our DNA holds evidence of a huge, ancient pandemic, one that touched many different species, spanned the globe, and lasted for more than 15 million years.
PBS
The Creature That Stumped Darwin
Toxodon was one of the last members of a lineage that vanished 11,000 years ago after thriving in isolation for millions of years. And its fossils would inspire a revolutionary thinker to tackle a bigger mystery than Toxodon itself:...
PBS
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...
PBS
The Evolution of the Heart (A Love Story)
In order to understand where hearts came from, we have to go back to the earliest common ancestor of everything that has a heart. It took hundreds of millions of years, and countless different iterations of the same basic structure to...
SciShow
You're Basically A Mushroom
The tree of life you learned in school is wrong, even if you just graduated. We like to sort eukaryotes into big kingdoms or supergroups, but scientists can't agree what those groups should be. Here's why that's a good thing.
SciShow
What is Taxonomy and Why is it So Complicated?
The classification of animal groups is essential to the the development of modern biology—but it's extremely complicated. Trying to shoehorn the messy, complicated web of interrelationships that is biology into neat boxes has resulted in...
SciShow
Where Did Humans Come From?
Hank tells us about new and confusing discoveries in the field of Human Evolution.
Bozeman Science
AP Biology - The Final Review
The final AP Biology Review. Chapters View all AP Biology 0:07 Section : Multiple Choice 1:00 Hardy-Weinberg 3:23 Chi-squared Test 5:29 Null Hypothesis 6:16 Respiration 7:30
SciShow
6 Lonely Branches on the Tree of Life
When there’s only one species on an evolutionary branch, we call it a monospecific taxon. Studying these special species can help us better understand not just those sparse groups, but all life on this planet. Chapters Homo sapiens 0:53...
PBS
When Fish Wore Armor
420 million years ago, some fish were more medieval. They wore armor, sometimes made of big plates, and sometimes made of interlocking scales. But that armor may actually have served a totally different purpose, one that many animals...
Bozeman Science
Unit 2 Review - Speciation
Paul Andersen reviews the major concepts within the second unit of the new AP Biology framework. He starts by describing how life is organized into three domains. He explains how the history of life on the planet is characterized by mass...
TED Talks
Svante Pääbo: DNA clues to our inner neanderthal
Sharing the results of a massive, worldwide study, geneticist Svante Pääbo shows the DNA proof that early humans mated with Neanderthals after we moved out of Africa. (Yes, many of us have Neanderthal DNA.) He also shows how a tiny bone...
SciShow
The Tree of Life Is Messed Up
Taxonomy is a powerful tool, and one that modern biology wouldn't be able to function without. But trying to shoehorn the messy, complicated web of interrelationships that is biology into neat boxes has resulted in a pretty messy tree of...
TED Talks
Jeff Hawkins: How brain science will change computing
Treo creator Jeff Hawkins urges us to take a new look at the brain -- to see it not as a fast processor, but as a memory system that stores and plays back experiences to help us predict, intelligently, what will happen next.
Bozeman Science
Evolution Continues
Paul Andersen explains how life has evolved and continues to evolve today. A brief discussion of artificial, natural and sexual selection is included. The beak of the finch is used to explain how directional selection is achieved.
SciShow
What Did the First Animal Look Like?
If you trace your way back along the tree of life, eventually you'd come face-to-face with the very first animal. But what exactly would that animal have looked like?
SciShow
Where Did Humans Come From?
Hank tells us about new and confusing discoveries in the field of Human Evolution.
Bozeman Science
Comparing DNA Sequences
Paul Andersen shows you how to compare DNA sequences to understand evolutionary relationships. He starts with a brief introduction to cladograms and evolutionary relationships. He shows you how to classify DNA relationships using a...
MinuteEarth
You Are A Fish
With our current understanding of evolutionary history and our strategy of cladistic naming, if we wanted to have both goldfish and sharks under a single group called "fish", then mammals must also be called fish....
PBS
When Apes Conquered Europe
Today, our closest evolutionary relatives, the apes, live only in small pockets of Africa and Asia. But back in the Miocene epoch, apes occupied all of Europe. Why aren't there wild apes in Europe today?