Season 2018 (2018)

How Two Microbes Changed History
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January 15, 2018 • 10m

What if I told you that, more than two billion years ago, some tiny living thing started to live inside another living thing … and...Read more

The Time Terror Birds Invaded
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January 22, 2018 • 10m

About 5 million years ago, a new predator made its way from the south and onto the coastal plains of North America. It was a giant...Read more

Untangling the Devil's Corkscrew
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January 29, 2018 • 10m

In the late 1800s, paleontologists in Nebraska found huge coils of hardened sand stuck deep in the earth. Local ranchers called th...Read more

The Great Snake Debate
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February 5, 2018 • 10m

90 million years ago, an ancient snake known as Najash had...legs. It is by no means the only snake to have limbs either. But what...Read more

The Whole Saga of the Supercontinents
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February 12, 2018 • 10m

The study of natural history is the study of how the world has changed but Earth itself is in a constant state of flux -- because ...Read more

From the Cambrian Explosion to the Great Dying
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February 20, 2018 • 10m

The first era of our current eon, the Paleozoic Era, is probably the most deceptively fascinating time in Earth’s history. With ne...Read more

How Sex Became a Thing
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February 26, 2018 • 10m

We don’t know which living thing was the very first to arrive at the totally revolutionary process that is sexual reproduction but...Read more

The Other Explosion You Should Know About
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March 5, 2018 • 10m

Fossils found around the world suggest that multi-cellular life was not only present before the Cambrian Explosion, it was much mo...Read more

How the Turtle Got Its Shell
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March 12, 2018 • 10m

Where did turtles come from? And how did the they get their shells? The answers to these questions would eventually cause scientis...Read more

What a Dinosaur Looks Like Under a Microscope
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March 19, 2018 • 10m

We traveled to Bozeman, Montana to meet with Dr. Ellen-Thérèse Lamm who explores ancient life by studying it at the cellular level...Read more

The Most Useful Fossils in the World
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March 26, 2018 • 10m

For decades, one of the most abundant kinds of fossils on Earth, numbering in the millions of specimens, was a mystery to paleonto...Read more

Inside the Dinosaur Library
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April 2, 2018 • 10m

We're back in Bozeman, Montana this week talking to Amy Atwater, Collections Manager at the Museum of the Rockies. MOR has among t...Read more

What Was the Ancestor of Everything?
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April 11, 2018 • 10m

The search for our origins go back to a single common ancestor -- one that remains shrouded in mystery. It’s the ancestor of every...Read more

How the Squid Lost Its Shell
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April 17, 2018 • 10m

The ancestors of modern, squishy cephalopods like the octopus and the squid all had shells. In ancient times, their shell was thei...Read more

How the Chalicothere Split In Two
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April 24, 2018 • 10m

Two extinct relatives of horses and rhinos are closely related to each other but have strikingly different body plans. How did two...Read more

The Age of Reptiles in Three Acts
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May 2, 2018 • 10m

Reptiles emerged from the Paleozoic as humble creatures, but in time, they grew to become some of the largest forms of life ever t...Read more

The Weird, Watery Tale of Spinosaurus
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May 8, 2018 • 10m

In 1912, a fossil collector discovered some strange bone fragments in the eerie, beautiful Cretaceous Bahariya rock formation of E...Read more

From the Fall of Dinos to the Rise of Humans
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May 16, 2018 • 10m

After taking you on a journey through geologic time, we've arrived at the Cenozoic Era. Most of the mammals and birds that you can...Read more

That Time It Rained for Two Million Years
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May 22, 2018 • 10m

At the beginning of the Triassic Period, with the continents locked together from pole-to-pole in the supercontinent of Pangea, th...Read more

Why Triassic Animals Were Just the Weirdest
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June 5, 2018 • 10m

The Triassic was full of creatures that look a lot like other, more modern species, even though they’re not closely related at all...Read more

Where Did Viruses Come From?
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June 12, 2018 • 10m

There are fossils of viruses, of sorts, preserved in the DNA of the hosts that they’ve infected. Including you. This molecular fos...Read more

When Fish First Breathed Air
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June 19, 2018 • 10m

385 million years ago, a group of fish would undertake one of the most important journeys in the history of life and become the fi...Read more

How the T-Rex Lost Its Arms
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June 26, 2018 • 10m

Tyrannosaurus rex was big, Tyrannosaurus rex was vicious, and Tyrannosaurus rex had tiny arms. The story of how T-Rex lost its arm...Read more

FAQs From Our First Year
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July 3, 2018 • 10m

Over the first season of PBS Eons, we’ve explored the history of Earth from the very origins of life right up to the Cenozoic Era ...Read more

When Insects First Flew
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July 10, 2018 • 10m

Insects were the first animals to ever develop the ability to fly, and, arguably, they did it the best. But this development was s...Read more

The Mystery of the Eocene’s Lethal Lake
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July 17, 2018 • 10m

In 1800s, miners began working in exposed deposits of mud near the town of Messel, Germany. They were extracting oil from the rock...Read more

When Fish Wore Armor
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July 24, 2018 • 10m

420 million years ago, some fish were more medieval. They wore armor, sometimes made of big plates, and sometimes made of interloc...Read more

When Birds Had Teeth
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August 7, 2018 • 10m

Experts are still arguing over whether Archaeopteryx was a true bird, or a paravian dinosaur, or some other kind of dino. But rega...Read more

How Horses Took Over North America (Twice)
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August 14, 2018 • 10m

The ancestors of modern horses became so successful that they spread all over the world, to Europe, Asia, South America, and Afric...Read more

How a Supervolcano Made the Cenozoic’s Coolest Fossils
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August 22, 2018 • 10m

One of the most dynamic, transformative, and potentially dangerous features in North America is also responsible for some of the c...Read more

The Rise and Fall of the Bone-Crushing Dogs
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August 28, 2018 • 10m

A huge and diverse subfamily of dogs, the bone-crushers patrolled North America for more than thirty million years, before they di...Read more

Life, Sex & Death Among the Dire Wolves
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September 6, 2018 • 10m

This is not a Game of Thrones fan fiction episode. Dire wolves were real! And thousands of them died in the same spot in Californi...Read more

When We First Walked
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September 11, 2018 • 10m

Fossilized footprints have proved that human ancestors were already striding across the landscape 3.6 million years ago. But who s...Read more

Did Raptorex Really Exist?
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September 18, 2018 • 10m

Paleontologists have been studying and drawing totally different conclusions about the fossil LH PV18 for almost a decade. Is it j...Read more

Can We Get DNA From Fossils?
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October 2, 2018 • 10m

In 1993, scientists cracked open a piece of amber, took out the body of an ancient weevil, and sampled its DNA. Or, at least, so w...Read more

When Giant Amphibians Reigned
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October 9, 2018 • 10m

Temnospondyls were a huge group of amphibians that existed for 210 million years. And calling them ‘diverse’ would be putting it m...Read more

Your Place in the Primate Family Tree
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October 16, 2018 • 10m

Purgatorius, a kind of mammal called a plesiadapiform, might’ve been one of your earliest ancestors. But how did we get from a mou...Read more

The Two People We're All Related To
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October 23, 2018 • 10m

Due to an odd quirk of genetics and some unique evolutionary circumstances, two humans who lived at different times in the distant...Read more

When Rodents Rafted Across the Ocean
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November 6, 2018 • 10m

The best evidence we have suggests that, while Caviomorpha originated in South America, they came from ancestors in Africa, over 4...Read more

When Birds Stopped Flying
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November 14, 2018 • 10m

Ratites have spread to Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and South America. And there are fossils of Ratites in Europe, Asia, and No...Read more

When Camels Roamed North America
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November 20, 2018 • 10m

Camels are famous for adaptations that have allowed them to flourish where most other large mammals would perish. But their story ...Read more

How Sloths Went From the Seas to the Trees
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November 28, 2018 • 10m

The story of sloths is one of astounding ecological variability, with some foraging in the seas, others living underground, and ot...Read more

When Sharks Swam the Great Plains
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December 4, 2018 • 10m

If you’ve ever been to, or lived in, or even flown over the central swath of North America, then you’ve seen the remnants of what ...Read more

When Apes Conquered Europe
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December 11, 2018 • 10m

Today, our closest evolutionary relatives, the apes, live only in small pockets of Africa and Asia. But back in the Miocene epoch,...Read more

Why Megalodon (Definitely) Went Extinct
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December 19, 2018 • 10m

For more than 10 million years, Megalodon was at the top of its game as the oceans’ apex predator...until 2.6 million years ago, w...Read more