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.

Humans may have been around for a long time, but life has existed for way longer. In this episode of Crash Course Biology, we’ll journey through deep time to uncover the history of life on Earth. We’ll explore the big, game-changing...

How can you tell two species apart? It’s not always simple. In this episode of Crash Course Biology, we’ll learn about speciation—a process that can happen over millions of years, or within a single generation. Along the way, we’ll...

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 &...

Charles Darwin encountered a tiny fox-like creature during his famous voyage but instead of discovering its fascinating evolutionary story, he just knocked it on the head with his geology hammer.

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.

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.

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

Just like animals, plants evolve and change over time. And you might think we'd be looking for things like fossils to figure out how they've changed, but some scientists are using a far less traditional resource: art.

We may think of a lot of critters with crab-like body plans as crabs, but, technically, many of them are other types of crustaceans. So why do they share so many physical traits?

Not too long ago, our early human ancestors were under constant threat of attack from predators. And it turns out that this difficult chapter in our history may be responsible for the adaptations that allowed us to become so successful.

Paul Andersen discusses the specifics of phylogenetics. The evolutionary relationships of organisms are discovered through both morphological and molecular data. A specific type of phylogenetic tree, the cladogram, is also covered.

About 136,000 years ago, on a coral atoll in the Indian Ocean, there lived a flightless bird. And when this atoll was swallowed up by the waves, that bird went extinct. ... Or did it? Did the flightless Aldabra rail evolve twice?

A video entitled “The Evidence for Evolution” which explores the origin of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and then focuses on the evidence used to study and support Darwin’s theory.

Whether it’s smoked, cured, barbecued, or fried — why is meat so hard for us to resist?