PBS
The Neandertal Burial That Taught Us About Humanity
If we can see ourselves in the way our ancient cousins dealt with death…what else could we have in common?
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...
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The Hellacious Lives of the "Hell Pigs"
Despite the name, we don’t know where the so-called “hell pigs” belong in the mammalian family tree. They walked on hooves, like pigs do, but had longer legs, almost like deer. They had hunched backs, a bit like rhinos or bison. But as...
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The Ghostly Origins of the Big Cats
All of today’s big cat species evolved less than 11 million years ago and yet their evolutionary history remains an almost total mystery. But scientists have recently discovered a major clue about the origins of the big cats, one that...
PBS
The Fuzzy Origins of the Giant Panda
How does a bear -- which is a member of the order Carnivora -- evolve into an herbivore? Despite how it looks, nothing about the history of the giant panda is black and white.
PBS
The Extreme Hyenas That Didn't Last
Hyenas weren’t always able to eat bones. In fact, only a few million years ago, they lived very different lives.
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
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
The Biggest Frog that Ever Lived
Untangling the origins of Beelzebufo -- the giant frog that lived alongside the dinosaurs -- turns out to be one of the most bedeviling problems in the history of amphibians.
PBS
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?
PBS
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.
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
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.
PBS
Is This The Oldest Dad In The Fossil Record?
Fossil evidence suggests Diictodon used burrows to breed, and that a parent stayed behind to feed and protect their young. And the parent that stayed behind? It might’ve been the male.
PBS
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?
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...
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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...
PBS
How the Smallest Animal Got So Simple
We tend to think that evolution only goes in one direction— toward getting bigger and more advanced. But that’s not always the case. This tiny, simple animal, the Myxozoans, (yes, animal!) evolved from something bigger and more complex.
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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?
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 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
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...