From a single-celled common ancestor, evolution has brought us all of Life’s Greatest Hits — including butterflies, beetles, bacteria, and human beings. In this episode of Crash Course Biology, we’ll learn how evolution explains life’s...

Crocodiles, and birds, and dinosaurs—oh my! While classifying organisms is nothing new, phylogeny— or, grouping organisms by their evolutionary relationships—is helping us see life in a whole new light. In this episode of Crash Course...

The ancestors of gars, horseshoe crabs and coelacanths looked almost the same as their modern relatives. Darwin called species like these “living fossils'' because they seem like they are evolutionarily frozen in time. But Darwin was wrong.

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.

The short-faced bears turned out to be remarkably adaptable, undergoing radical changes to meet the demands of two changing continents. And yet, for reasons we don’t quite understand, their adaptability wasn’t enough to keep them from...

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.

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...

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...

Hank tells us about new and confusing discoveries in the field of Human Evolution.

Of all the weird animals that exist in the world, platypuses are up there with the weirdest, and last year scientists discovered something even more peculiar about their fur: it glows! What may be even more strange, though, is how little...

Hank brings us some late-breaking news from the genus Homo - a team of scientists has sequenced the genome of the Denisova hominin, the latest member to be added to the human family tree.

Earlier this week, a team of researchers announced that they’d made a discovery about how we inherit mitochondrial DNA from our parents that could change what we know about not only disease inheritance, but human history as a whole.

Is there a chance that more species may actually be closer to fish than we originally thought?

Hank brings us some late-breaking news from the genus Homo - a team of scientists has sequenced the genome of the Denisova hominin, the latest member to be added to the human family tree.

When we breathe out, we empty our lungs. But an ancient reptile figured out a more efficient way to breathe, which ultimately helped birds dominate the skies.

Newly described wormlike fossils dating back over half a billion years might be our oldest ancestors, and researchers have mapped and visualized the physical structure of the microscopic communities growing on human tongues!

The Researchers reconstructed the face of the organism which might be one of our earliest ancestors. Meanwhile, two researchers from Harvard announced that they have created solid metallic hydrogen.

Today, penguins are found mainly in the Southern Hemisphere. But fossils have revealed giant lookalikes to these swimming birds further up north, spurring questions of how they evolved and what happened to them.

You probably remember the T.rex's iconic roar from Jurassic Park, but it turns out that dinosaurs actually didn't sound that ferocious.

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...

If you've been wondering why we have butts, wonder no more! We have an answer for you.

Researchers have an idea about how your lifestyle affects the way you see the dress, and we've identified a new ancestor to the dinosaurs!

Of all the weird animals that exist in the world, platypuses are up there with the weirdest, and last year scientists discovered something even more peculiar about their fur: it glows! What may be even more strange, though, is how little...

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?