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.

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?

It would take decades for paleontologists to realize that maybe there wasn’t just one so-called "cradle of humankind," and realize that maybe they’d been asking the wrong question all along.

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.

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.

Long-jawed proboscideans were doing pretty well for themselves. That is, until they were all rapidly replaced with proboscideans with long, flexible trunks instead: mammoths, mastodons, and our modern elephants.What suddenly made long...

Where did our unique moon come from? It turns out that lunar rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts are a clue, pointing to the origin of our closest cosmic companion, an origin even stranger than you might imagine

While the evolution of the butthole was a major breakthrough in animal development, its story might actually end with redefining what it means to have a butthole at all.

Climbing to the summit of the Eurasian food chain was one of the Neandertals’ most impressive evolutionary feats, but in the end, it may have actually been what doomed them.

We may have planet-shattering asteroids to thank for the origin of life on Earth.

Since the 1990s, paleontologists have been pulling 125-million-year-old complete dinosaur skeletons from the rocks of the Lujiatun in Northeastern China, most seemingly posed in perfect rest. This has prompted comparisons to a famous...

Mountains have a unique effect on diversity, messing with our understanding of animals through time, and pretty much just making evolution weird. And they would eventually reveal something even stranger about a group of mammals even...

An asteroid impact triggered the K-Pg mass extinction, wiping out the non-avian dinosaurs, ending the Age of Reptiles, and ushering in the Age of Mammals. But why was it the mammals who triumphed?

Scientists have been trying to solve the mystery of why plate tectonics works the way it does for over a hundred years. And they might have just uncovered a key to cracking it.

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...

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?

Unlike in fiction, giant whales do not emerge fully-formed from the ocean deep. So, where did Livyatan melvillei come from? How did such a large predator live? And what caused the titan to die out? The answer may lie in an appetite so...

This is the hundred-year tale of how an unlikely bunch of bottom-dwelling marine critters helped reveal that ocean basins are basically reincarnated every few hundred million years.

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…

Where are all the east coast dinosaurs? Why don’t we find famous species like Triceratops in Central Park? Turns out, evolution and geology came together to make the east coast into an ancient lost world of weird dinosaurs.

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.

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....

Turns out, instead of having bats to thank for the existence of butterflies, the groups we should actually be thanking are…bees and beans.

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.