January 13, 2021 • 10m
It’s important to us that you understand how big this beaver was. Just like modern beavers, it was semiaquatic -- it lived both on...Read more
January 21, 2021 • 10m
This ancient species had the same six legs and segmented body that we’d recognize from an ant today. But it also had a huge, scyth...Read more
January 28, 2021 • 10m
Our DNA holds evidence of a huge, ancient pandemic, one that touched many different species, spanned the globe, and lasted for mor...Read more
February 11, 2021 • 10m
The evolution of our ability to speak is its own epic saga and it’s worth pausing to appreciate that. It’s taken several million y...Read more
February 17, 2021 • 10m
The biggest turtle ever described wasn’t an ancestor of today’s leatherback turtles or any other living sea turtles. But it looks ...Read more
February 24, 2021 • 10m
Our DNA holds thousands of dead genes and we’ve only just begun to unravel their stories. But one thing is already clear: we’re no...Read more
March 10, 2021 • 10m
It's possible Euchambersia possessed venom about 20 million years before the first lizards and over 150 million years before the f...Read more
March 18, 2021 • 10m
Elongated tubes, flat ribbons, and other “worm-like” body plans were so varied and abundant that a part of the Ediacaran is someti...Read more
March 24, 2021 • 10m
No other placental mammal that we know of prefers one side of the body so consistently, not even our closest primate relatives. Bu...Read more
April 7, 2021 • 10m
Today, chilis are the most widely cultivated spice crop in the world - grown everywhere from their native home in the Americas to ...Read more
April 20, 2021 • 10m
Nunalleq, a village in what’s today southwest Alaska, seemed to have thrived during the Little Ice Age. How did this village manag...Read more
April 29, 2021 • 10m
While dinosaurs were dominating the land, the metriorhynchids were thriving in the seas. But taking that plunge wasn’t easy becaus...Read more
May 12, 2021 • 10m
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, excep...Read more
May 20, 2021 • 10m
Weasels have an extreme body plan that may push the boundaries of what’s metabolically possible. So when and how did this happen? ...Read more
June 3, 2021 • 10m
It might surprise you but cephalopods have a pretty good fossil record, with one major exception. If squids were swimming around i...Read more
July 14, 2021 • 10m
At Tanque Loma, at least 22 giant ground sloths in the genus Eremotherium met their end. Of the five hypotheses that researchers p...Read more
July 21, 2021 • 10m
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 case...Read more
July 29, 2021 • 10m
The Wrangel Island mammoths would end up being the final survivors of a once-widespread genus. In their final years, after having ...Read more
August 12, 2021 • 10m
The remains of medium-sized predatory dinosaurs are pretty rare in places where giant predators like T. rex existed. Which is weir...Read more
August 24, 2021 • 10m
The story of how the starfish got its arms reminds us that even animals that might be familiar to us today can have incredibly dee...Read more
September 1, 2021 • 10m
Toxodon was one of the last members of a lineage that vanished 11,000 years ago after thriving in isolation for millions of years....Read more
September 16, 2021 • 10m
The world of the Jurassic was a lot like ours - similar interactions between plants and insects were happening, but the players ha...Read more
September 23, 2021 • 10m
The Toba supervolcano was the biggest explosive eruption of the last 2.5 million years. And humans were around to see it, or at le...Read more
September 29, 2021 • 10m
The Amazon rainforest of South America is a paradise for flowering plants. But long ago, the landscape that we now think of as the...Read more
October 7, 2021 • 10m
For decades, scientists believed dinosaurs were diurnal and tiny mammals were nocturnal. But as researchers have uncovered more ma...Read more
October 21, 2021 • 10m
It looks like the evolution of ocean-going whales like Borealodon may have affected communities found in the deep ocean, like the ...Read more
October 28, 2021 • 10m
Dinosaur mating behavior has been the subject of a lot of speculation, but what can we actually say about it from the fossil record?
November 17, 2021 • 10m
Plants first made their way onto land at least 470 million years ago but for their first 80 million years, leaves as we know them ...Read more
December 2, 2021 • 10m
These relatives of ours lived in Eurasia for more than 300,000 years. They were expert toolmakers, using materials like stone, woo...Read more
December 9, 2021 • 10m
The hardened residue scraped off your teeth at the dentist is called your dental calculus, and your dental calculus is the only pa...Read more
December 16, 2021 • 10m
If you know one thing about pterosaurs, it’s that they’re flyers. And while pterosaurs may be well-known for their domination of t...Read more