Season 2020 (2020)

That Time the Mediterranean Sea Disappeared
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January 9, 2020 • 10m

How could a body of water as big as the Mediterranean just...disappear? It would take decades and more than 1,000 research studies...Read more

The Neanderthals That Taught Us About Humanity
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January 16, 2020 • 10m

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Neandertals were thought to have been…primitive. Unintelligent, hunched-over caveme...Read more

The Giant Dinosaur That Was Missing a Body
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January 28, 2020 • 10m

From end to end, its forelimbs alone measured an incredible 2.4 meters long and were tipped with big, comma-shaped claws. But othe...Read more

How South America Made the Marsupials
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February 4, 2020 • 10m

Throughout the Cenozoic Era -- the era we’re in now -- marsupials and their metatherian relatives flourished all over South Americ...Read more

A Short Tale About Diplodocus' Long Neck
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February 11, 2020 • 10m

Long necks gave sauropods a huge advantage when it came to food, but not in the way you think. And this benefit would allow them t...Read more

When the Rainforests Collapsed
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February 19, 2020 • 10m

The Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse set the stage for a takeover that would be a crucial turning point in the history of terrest...Read more

How a Hot Planet Created the World's Biggest Snake
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February 27, 2020 • 10m

About 59 million years ago, the largest animal lurking in the ancient forests of Colombia by far was Titanoboa - the largest snake...Read more

When the Sahara Was Green
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March 10, 2020 • 10m

The climate of the Sahara was completely different thousands of years ago. And we’re not talking about just a few years of extra r...Read more

When Penguins Went From The Sky To The Sea
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March 18, 2020 • 10m

Today, we think of penguins as small-ish, waddling, tuxedo-birds. But they evolved from a flying ancestor, were actual giants for ...Read more

How the Egg Came First
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March 25, 2020 • 10m

The story of the egg spans millions of years, from the first vertebrates that dared to venture onto land to today’s mammals, inclu...Read more

How Dogs (Eventually) Became Our Best Friends
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March 31, 2020 • 10m

We’re still figuring out the details, but most scientists agree that it took thousands of years of interactions to develop our dee...Read more

When a Billion Years Disappeared
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April 15, 2020 • 10m

In some places, the rocks below the Great Unconformity are about 1.2 billion years older than those above it. This missing chapter...Read more

The Risky Paleo Diets of Our Ancestors
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April 22, 2020 • 10m

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...Read more

How the Andes Mountains Might Have Killed a Bunch of Whales
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April 29, 2020 • 10m

At a site known as Cerro Ballena or Whale Hill, there are more than 40 skeletons of marine mammals -- a graveyard of ocean life da...Read more

How Plants Caused the First Mass Extinction
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May 12, 2020 • 10m

In the middle of the Cambrian, life on land was about to get a little more crowded. And those newcomers would end up changing the ...Read more

The Two Viruses That We’ve Had For Millions of Years
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May 20, 2020 • 10m

There’s one kind of herpesvirus that’s specific to one species of primate, and each virus split off from the herpesvirus family tr...Read more

How We Identified One of Earth’s Earliest Animals
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May 28, 2020 • 10m

Scientists had no idea what type of organisms the life forms of the Ediacaran were—lichen, colonies of bacteria, fungi or somethin...Read more

When Dinosaur Look-Alikes Ruled the Earth
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June 9, 2020 • 10m

There were a huge number of croc-like animals that flourished during the Triassic Period. Dinosaurs had just arrived on the scene ...Read more

The World Before Plate Tectonics
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June 16, 2020 • 10m

There was a time in Earth’s history that was so stable, geologists once called it the Boring Billion. But the fact is, this period...Read more

When Dinosaurs Chilled in the Arctic
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June 24, 2020 • 10m

All told, the Arctic in the Cretaceous Period was a rough place to live, especially in winter. And yet, the fossils of many kinds ...Read more

How the Walrus Got Its Tusks
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July 7, 2020 • 10m

The rise and fall of ancient walruses, and how modern ones got their tusks, is a story that spans almost 20 million years. And whi...Read more

The Story of the Dino Stampede
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July 16, 2020 • 10m

To try to solve the puzzle of Lark Quarry, experts have turned to a special subfield of paleontology -- paleoichnology, or the stu...Read more

The Biggest Frog that Ever Lived
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July 23, 2020 • 10m

Untangling the origins of Beelzebufo -- the giant frog that lived alongside the dinosaurs -- turns out to be one of the most bedev...Read more

The Dinosaur Who Was Buried at Sea
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August 5, 2020 • 10m

Paleontologists have been studying these dinosaurs since the 1830s, but nobody had ever found a specimen like Borealopelta before....Read more

How We Figured Out Fermentation
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August 13, 2020 • 10m

Thanks to a recent adaptation, instead of getting sick from the boozy, fermented fruits, one of our primate ancestors could digest...Read more

The Oddest Couple in the Fossil Record
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August 20, 2020 • 10m

To figure out how Thrinaxodon and Broomistega became entombed together, scientists looked at the burrow itself, along with their f...Read more

How Ancient Art Captured Australian Megafauna
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September 2, 2020 • 10m

Beneath layers of rock art are drawings of animals SO strange that, for a long time, some anthropologists thought they could only ...Read more

The Sea Monster from the Andes
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September 10, 2020 • 10m

In 1977, a farmer was plowing his field on a plateau high in the Andes mountains when he stumbled upon a giant fossilized skeleton...Read more

When Rodents Had Horns
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September 15, 2020 • 10m

These odd rodents belong to a genus known as Ceratogaulus, but they’re more commonly called horned gophers, because, you guessed i...Read more

The First and Last North American Primates
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September 30, 2020 • 10m

Early primates not only lived in North America -- our primate family tree actually originated here! So what happened to those early relatives of ours?

How Plants Became Carnivores
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October 7, 2020 • 10m

How and why does botanical carnivory keep evolving? It turns out that when any of the basic things that most plants need aren’t th...Read more

How Ankylosaurs Got Their Clubs
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October 13, 2020 • 10m

While clubs are practically synonymous with ankylosaurs, we’ve only started to get to the bottom of how they worked and how this u...Read more

Why Do Things Keep Evolving Into Crabs?
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October 28, 2020 • 10m

For some reason, animals keep evolving into things that look like crabs, independently, over and over again. What is it about the ...Read more

How Plankton Created A Bizarre Giant of the Seas
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November 10, 2020 • 10m

At more than 2 meters long, Aegirocassis was not only the biggest radiodont ever, but it also may have been the biggest animal in ...Read more

The Rise and Fall of the Tallest Mammal to Walk the Earth
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November 19, 2020 • 10m

It arose from rhino ancestors that were a lot smaller, but Paraceratherium would take a different evolutionary path. Believe it or...Read more

How Humans Lost Their Fur
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December 2, 2020 • 10m

We’re the only primate without a coat of thick fur. It turns out that this small change in our appearance has had huge consequence...Read more

When Lizards Took Over the World
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December 9, 2020 • 10m

Lizards are incredibly widespread and diverse but it took them a long time to get to where they are now. Because they used to face...Read more

When the Earth Suddenly Stopped Warming
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December 17, 2020 • 10m

For decades, scientists have been studying the cause of the Younger Dryas, and trying to figure out if something like it could hap...Read more

The Triassic Reptile With "Two Faces"
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December 22, 2020 • 10m

Figuring out what this creature’s face actually looked like would take paleontologists years. But understanding this weird animal ...Read more