While sour taste's original purpose was to warn vertebrates of danger, in a few animal groups, including us, its role has reversed. The taste of danger became something it was dangerous for us to avoid.

420 million years ago, the forest floor of what's now New York was covered with a plant that didn’t look like a tree at all, except its roots were made of wood. Instead of looking up to learn about the evolution of trees, it turns out...

The climate of the Sahara was completely different thousands of years ago. And we’re not talking about just a few years of extra rain. We’re talking about a climate that was so wet for so long that animals and humans alike made...

The Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse set the stage for a takeover that would be a crucial turning point in the history of terrestrial animal life. If it weren’t for that time when the rainforests collapsed - in an extinction event that...

Megaloceros was one of the largest members of the deer family ever to walk the Earth. The archaeological record is full of evidence that our ancestors lived alongside and interacted with these giant mammals for millennia. But what...

There were a huge number of croc-like animals that flourished during the Triassic Period. Dinosaurs had just arrived on the scene but it was these animals that truly ruled the Earth, becoming both abundant and diverse.

Maybe it’s a little self-centered that we can be pretty focused on the DNA that we got from Neanderthals – but we shouldn’t forget that gene flow goes both ways.

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.

Lots of the traits we think of as defining us as mammals show up pretty early, during the time of the dinosaurs. And, in some cases, they show up a lot earlier and in things that weren’t mammals at all.

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?

We can track our history of eating just about anything back through the fossil record and see the impact it’s had on our evolution. Throughout time, part of the secret to our success as a species has been our early - and sometimes fatal...

It arose from rhino ancestors that were a lot smaller, but Paraceratherium would take a different evolutionary path. Believe it or not, it actually became so big that it probably got close to what scientists think might be the actual...

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...

What’s the real story of the dodo? How did such a unique bird even evolve in the first place? And are we really responsible for its extinction?

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...

Our DNA holds evidence of a huge, ancient pandemic, one that touched many different species, spanned the globe, and lasted for more than 15 million years.

To figure out how Thrinaxodon and Broomistega became entombed together, scientists looked at the burrow itself, along with their fossilized bones. And it looks like their luck ran out, when a behavior that usually would’ve helped them...

If we can see ourselves in the way our ancient cousins dealt with death…what else could we have in common?

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...

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...

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.

Hyenas weren’t always able to eat bones. In fact, only a few million years ago, they lived very different lives.

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...

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:...