PBS
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...
PBS
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...
PBS
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.
PBS
The History of Climate Cycles (and the Woolly Rhino) Explained
Throughout the Pleistocene Epoch, the range of the woolly rhino grew and shrank in sync with global climate. So what caused the climate -- and the range of the woolly rhino -- to cycle back and forth between such extremes?
PBS
The Forgotten Story of the Beardogs
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...
PBS
How Worm Holes Ended Wormworld
Elongated tubes, flat ribbons, and other “worm-like” body plans were so varied and abundant that a part of the Ediacaran is sometimes known as Wormworld. But in the end, the ancient Wormworld was ended by the actions of its very own worms.
PBS
How Volcanoes Froze the Earth (Twice)
Over 600 million years ago, sheets of ice coated our planet on both land and sea. How did this happen? And most importantly for us, why did the planet eventually thaw again? The evidence for Snowball Earth is written on every continent...
PBS
How To Survive the Little Ice Age
Nunalleq, a village in what’s today southwest Alaska, seemed to have thrived during the Little Ice Age. How did this village manage to survive and prosper during this time period? And what caused this period of climate change in the...
PBS
How South America Made the Marsupials
Throughout the Cenozoic Era -- the era we’re in now -- marsupials and their metatherian relatives flourished all over South America, filling all kinds of ecological niches and radiating into forms that still thrive on other continents.
PBS
How Plants Caused the First Mass Extinction
In the middle of the Cambrian, life on land was about to get a little more crowded. And those newcomers would end up changing the world. The arrival of plants on land would make the world colder, drain much of the oxygen out of the...
PBS
The Sea Monster from the Andes
In 1977, a farmer was plowing his field on a plateau high in the Andes mountains when he stumbled upon a giant fossilized skeleton. How did this giant marine reptile end up high in the Andes Mountains?
PBS
The Return of Giant Skin-Shell Sea Turtles
The biggest turtle ever described wasn’t an ancestor of today’s leatherback turtles or any other living sea turtles. But it looks like there are some things about being a giant, skin-shelled sea turtle that just work, no matter where, or...
PBS
The Raptor That Made Us Rethink Dinosaurs
In 1964, a paleontologist named John Ostrom unearthed some fascinating fossils from the mudstone of Montana. Its discovery set the stage for what’s known today as the Dinosaur Renaissance, a total re-thinking of what we thought we knew...
PBS
The Island of the Last Surviving Mammoths
The Wrangel Island mammoths would end up being the final survivors of a once-widespread genus. In their final years, after having thrived in many parts of the world for millions of years, the very last mammoths that ever lived...
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...
PBS
How We Domesticated Cats (Twice)
A 9,500-year-old burial in Cyprus represents some of the oldest known evidence of human/cat companionships anywhere in the world. But when did this close relationship between humans and cats start? And how did humans help cats take over...
PBS
When the Earth Suddenly Stopped Warming
For decades, scientists have been studying the cause of the Younger Dryas, and trying to figure out if something like it could happen again. And it turns out that what caused this event is the subject of a heated debate.
PBS
What If Dark Matter Is Just Black Holes?
It may be that for every star in the universe there are billions of microscopic black holes streaming through the solar system, the planet, even our bodies every second. Sounds horrible - but hey, at least we’d have explained dark matter.
PBS
Why Quantum Computing Requires Quantum Cryptography
Quantum computing is cool, but you know what would be extra awesome - a quantum internet. In fact if we want the first we’ll need the latter. And the first step to the quantum internet is quantum cryptography.
PBS
The Evolution of the Modern Milky Way Galaxy
When we scan the heavens with giant telescopes we see galactic cannibalism everywhere. We see moments that appear frozen on the human timescale, but are really snapshots of the incredibly violent process of galaxy formation. This is how...
PBS
The Alchemy of Neutron Star Collisions
Carl Sagan’s famous words: “We are star stuff” refers to a mind-blowing idea – that most atomic nuclei in our bodies were created in the nuclear furnace and the explosive deaths of stars that lived in the ancient universe. In recent...
PBS
Were These Monsters Inspired by Fossils? (w/ Monstrum!)
People have been discovering the traces and remains of prehistoric creatures for thousands of years. And they’ve also probably been telling stories about fantastic beasts since language became a thing. So, is it possible that the...
PBS
When a Billion Years Disappeared
In some places, the rocks below the Great Unconformity are about 1.2 billion years older than those above it. This missing chapter in Earth’s history might be linked to a fracturing supercontinent, out-of-control glaciers, and maybe the...
PBS
How Blood Evolved (Many Times)
Blood is one of the most revolutionary features in our evolutionary history. Over hundreds of millions of years, the way in which blood does its job has changed over and over again. As a result, we animals have our familiar red blood....