Season 2019 (2019)

When Humans Were Prey
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January 8, 2019 • 10m

Not too long ago, our early human ancestors were under constant threat of attack from predators. And it turns out that this diffic...Read more

How Blood Evolved (Many Times)
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January 15, 2019 • 10m

Blood is one of the most revolutionary features in our evolutionary history. Over hundreds of millions of years, the way in which ...Read more

The Humans That Lived Before Us
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January 29, 2019 • 10m

As more and more fossil ancestors have been found, our genus has become more and more inclusive, incorporating more members that l...Read more

The Island of Shrinking Mammoths
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February 5, 2019 • 10m

The mammoths fossils found on the Channel Islands off the coast of southern California are much smaller than their relatives found...Read more

The Evolution of the Heart (A Love Story)
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February 13, 2019 • 10m

In order to understand where hearts came from, we have to go back to the earliest common ancestor of everything that has a heart. ...Read more

How 7,000 Years of Epic Floods Changed the World
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February 27, 2019 • 10m

Strange geologic landmarks in the Pacific Northwest are the lingering remains of a mystery that took nearly half a century to solv...Read more

The Island of Huge Hamsters and Giant Owls
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March 5, 2019 • 10m

Back in the late Miocene epoch, there was an island--or maybe a group of islands-- in the Mediterranean Sea that was populated wit...Read more

The Giant Bird That Got Lost in Time
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March 12, 2019 • 10m

The California condor is the biggest flying bird in North America, a title that it has held since the Late Pleistocene Epoch. It's...Read more

When We First Made Tools
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March 26, 2019 • 10m

The tools made by our human ancestors may not seem like much when you compare them to the screen you’re looking at right now but t...Read more

When Giant Scorpions Swarmed the Seas
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April 2, 2019 • 10m

Sea scorpions thrived for 200 million years, coming in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Over time, they developed a number of a...Read more

When We Tamed Fire
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April 9, 2019 • 10m

The ability to make and use fire has fundamentally changed the arc of our evolution. The bodies we have today were, in many ways, ...Read more

The Mystery Behind the Biggest Bears of All Time
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April 23, 2019 • 10m

The short-faced bears turned out to be remarkably adaptable, undergoing radical changes to meet the demands of two changing contin...Read more

The Croc That Ran on Hooves
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May 1, 2019 • 10m

In the Eocene Epoch, there was a reptile that had teeth equipped for biting through flesh, its hind legs were a lot longer than it...Read more

When We Took Over the World
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May 7, 2019 • 10m

From our deepest origins in Africa all the way to the Americas, by looking at the fossils and archaeological materials we have bee...Read more

The Ghostly Origins of the Big Cats
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May 16, 2019 • 10m

All of today’s big cat species evolved less than 11 million years ago and yet their evolutionary history remains an almost total m...Read more

The History of Climate Cycles (and the Woolly Rhino) Explained
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May 30, 2019 • 10m

Throughout the Pleistocene Epoch, the range of the woolly rhino grew and shrank in sync with global climate. So what caused the cl...Read more

The Hellacious Lives of the "Hell Pigs"
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June 5, 2019 • 10m

Despite the name, we don’t know where the so-called “hell pigs” belong in the mammalian family tree. They walked on hooves, like p...Read more

How Evolution Works (And How We Figured It Out)
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June 11, 2019 • 10m

As a scientific concept, evolution was revolutionary when it was first introduced. With the help of all three of our hosts and the...Read more

When the Synapsids Struck Back
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June 19, 2019 • 10m

Synapsids were the world’s first-ever terrestrial megafauna but the vast majority of these giants were doomed to extinction. Howev...Read more

When Ichthyosaurs Led a Revolution in the Seas
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June 25, 2019 • 10m

The marine reptiles Ichthyosaurs arose after The Great Dying, which wiped out at least 90 percent of life in the oceans, changing ...Read more

When We Met Other Human Species
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July 9, 2019 • 10m

We all belong to the only group of hominins on the planet today. But we weren’t always alone. 100,000 years ago, Eurasia was home ...Read more

How Volcanoes Froze the Earth (Twice)
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July 17, 2019 • 10m

Over 600 million years ago, sheets of ice coated our planet on both land and sea. How did this happen? And most importantly for us...Read more

How Earth's First, Unkillable Animals Saved the World
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July 30, 2019 • 10m

They have survived every catastrophe and every mass extinction event that nature has thrown at them. And by being the little, filt...Read more

When Giant Deer Roamed Eurasia
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August 7, 2019 • 10m

Megaloceros was one of the largest members of the deer family ever to walk the Earth. The archaeological record is full of evidenc...Read more

Was This Dinosaur a Cannibal?
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August 14, 2019 • 10m

Paleontologists have spent the better part of two decades debating whether Coelophysis ate its own kind. It turns out, the evidenc...Read more

The Missing Link That Wasn’t
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August 21, 2019 • 10m

The myth of the Missing Link--the idea that there must be a specimen that partly resembles an ape but also partly resembles a mode...Read more

The Raptor That Made Us Rethink Dinosaurs
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August 28, 2019 • 10m

In 1964, a paleontologist named John Ostrom unearthed some fascinating fossils from the mudstone of Montana. Its discovery set the...Read more

When Bats Took Flight
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September 11, 2019 • 10m

Bats pretty much appear in the fossil record as recognizable, full-on, flying bats. And they show up on all of the continents, exc...Read more

How Pterosaurs Got Their Wings
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September 18, 2019 • 10m

When pterosaurs first took flight, you could say that it marked the beginning of the end for the winged reptiles. Because, strange...Read more

When Giant Lemurs Ruled Madagascar
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September 25, 2019 • 10m

Just a few thousand years ago, the island of Madagascar was inhabited by giant lemurs. How did such a diverse group of primates ev...Read more

When Antarctica Was Green
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October 3, 2019 • 10m

Before the start of the Eocene Epoch about 56 million years ago--Antarctica was still joined to both Australia and South America. ...Read more

The Case of the Dinosaur Egg Thief
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October 16, 2019 • 10m

Paleontologists found a small theropod dinosaur skull right on top of a nest of eggs that were believed to belong to a plant-eatin...Read more

When Hobbits Were Real
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October 22, 2019 • 10m

Its discoverers named it Homo floresiensis, but it’s often called “the hobbit” for its short stature and oddly proportioned feet. ...Read more

Were These Monsters Inspired by Fossils?
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October 29, 2019 • 10m

People have been discovering the traces and remains of prehistoric creatures for thousands of years. And they’ve also probably bee...Read more

How We Domesticated Cats (Twice)
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November 6, 2019 • 10m

A 9,500 year old burial in Cyprus represents some of the oldest known evidence of human/cat companionships anywhere in the world. ...Read more

When Giant Hypercarnivores Prowled Africa
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November 19, 2019 • 10m

These hyaenodonts gave the world some of its largest terrestrial, carnivorous mammals ever known. And while these behemoths were t...Read more

Why Male Mammoths Lost the Game
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November 26, 2019 • 10m

Woolly mammoths, our favorite ice age proboscidean, disappeared from Europe and North America at the end of the last ice age, abou...Read more

The Forgotten Story of the Beardogs
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December 12, 2019 • 10m

Because of their strange combination of bear-like and dog-like traits, they’re sometimes confusingly called the beardogs. And even...Read more

The Fuzzy Origins of the Giant Panda
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December 17, 2019 • 10m

How does a bear -- which is a member of the order Carnivora -- evolve into an herbivore? Despite how it looks, nothing about the h...Read more