PBS
Why The Giraffe Got Its Neck
How and why the giraffe's neck emerged in the first place has been a mystery that generations of biologists have argued over – one that has made us reconsider our understanding of how evolution actually works over and over again.
PBS
Did a Tsunami Swallow Part of Europe?
What happened to the piece of prime prehistoric real estate known as Doggerland? While a massive megatsunami might have drowned it for good, the underlying reason that it now lies under the sea may have actually been the same thing that...
PBS
That Time The Ocean Lost (Almost) All Its Oxygen
This is the story of how our planet rescued itself from extreme conditions in the Cretaceous Period, at the cost of essentially suffocating the oceans for half-a-million years.
PBS
You're Living On An Ant Planet
How did ants take over the world? Well, it looks like they didn’t achieve world domination all by themselves. They may have just been riding the wave of a totally different evolutionary explosion.
PBS
We Helped Make Mosquitoes A Problem
Around 6,000 years ago, in the Sahel region of Africa, a lone female mosquito buzzed through the lush, green savannah. She couldn’t know it, but the planet itself was about to change in ways that would see her descendants evolve to live...
PBS
The Huge Extinctions We Are Just Now Discovering
What graptolites tell us is a story of incredible changes in the ocean, of periods where the oceans became poisonous and suffocating before eventually clearing up again. They unlock extinctions and recoveries that scientists didn't see....
PBS
Beans & Bees (Not Bats) Gave Us Butterflies
Turns out, instead of having bats to thank for the existence of butterflies, the groups we should actually be thanking are…bees and beans.
PBS
Why Only Earth Has Fire
To get fire, which exists only on Earth, it took billions of years of photosynthesis – which means fire can’t exist without life. And fire and life have been shaping each other ever since.
PBS
How Ancient Microbes Rode Bug Bits Out to Sea
Tiny exoskeleton fragments may have allowed some of the most important microbes in the planet’s history to set sail out into the open ocean and change the world forever.
PBS
Our Most Mysterious Extinct Cousins
There was a group of hominins, those creatures more closely related to us than to chimpanzees, that did take a different, parallel journey from our ancestors. Our paths ran beside each other - and potentially even crossed at times - but...
PBS
Animals Are Older Than We Thought
What are animal-like fossils doing in rocks a billion years old, and what does that mean for our understanding of their evolution and geologic time itself? Turns out, there might've been a long, slow-burning fuse that ultimately ignited...
PBS
Why Is It So Hard to Tell the Sex of a Dinosaur?
While we think we know a lot about dinosaurs – like how they moved and what they ate – for a long time, we haven’t been able to ID one seemingly basic thing about their biology... Which are males and which are females?
PBS
How Snake Venom Sparked An Evolutionary Arms Race
For some, the rise and spread of venomous elapids was just another challenge to adapt to. For others, it was a catastrophe of almost apocalyptic proportions. And we humans are no exception, because it seems that when elapids slithered...
PBS
What Was The Earliest Surgery?
When did practicing medicine - in its varied, complex forms (from sharing medicinal plants to the earliest surgeries) - become something that we actually started doing? While it’s a hard question to answer, it’s possible that our...
PBS
What Will Earth Be Like 300 Million Years From Now?
We spend a lot of time here on Eons looking backwards into deep time, visiting ancient chapters of our planet’s history. But this time, we’re taking a look towards the deep future. After all, the story is far from over.
PBS
The Hazy Evolutionary History of Cannabis
How did such a strange plant like cannabis come to be in the first place? When and where did we first domesticate it? And why oh why does it get us high?
PBS
The Second Time Sponges Took Over The World
Researchers have discovered a piece of a weird, but critical, time in the deep past…a time when the first-ever mass extinction may have turned Planet Earth into Sponge World.
PBS
When The Atlantic Ripped Open A Supercontinent
While the eruptions of the volcanoes along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge usually don't trouble us, their birth was once responsible for ripping a supercontinent apart and creating the Atlantic Ocean that we know today.
PBS
When India Was An Island
We need to talk about the biggest break-up of all-time: the break-up of the supercontinent Pangea, and how, ultimately, when India smashed back into Asia, it traded one form of evolutionary isolation for another.
PBS
Webs vs Wings: the Arms Race of the Air
Spiders and their ancestors have been driving an arms race that began before either stepped foot onto land and resulted in the first powered flight on Earth. But how did this competition of webs versus wings drive such a massive...
PBS
When Red Pandas Roamed North America
How did a relative of the red panda end up in North America? What can this tell us about how long ago – and how many times – North America was connected to Europe and Asia?
PBS
Darwin's Unexpected Final Obsession
After having solved the small matter of evolution by natural selection - becoming one of the most famous scientists in the world in the process - Charles Darwin turned his focus to a different personal obsession…
SciShow
The Founder Of Forensic Anthropology Was Wrong About Everything
Aleš Hrdlička is known as the founder of forensic anthropology, and remains a huge part of the story of the history of anthropology as a science. But his legacy of racism and just bad science is one that this field has been reckoning...
PBS
How Plankton Created A Bizarre Giant of the Seas
At more than 2 meters long, Aegirocassis was not only the biggest radiodont ever, but it also may have been the biggest animal in the Early Ordovician. This bizarre marine giant may have only been possible, thanks to a major revolution...