Eons

E1 Episode 1: How our deadliest parasite turned to the dark side

• Now playing
• 10m
• Jan 11, 2022

Around 10,000 years ago, somewhere in Africa, a microscopic parasite made a huge leap. With a little help from a mosquito, it left its animal host - probably a gorilla - and found its way to a new host: us.

E2 Episode 2: Primates vs Snakes (An Evolutionary Arms Race)

• 10m
• Jan 19, 2022

The Snake Detection Hypothesis proposes that the ability to quickly spot and avoid snakes is deeply embedded in primates, including us - an evolutionary consequence of the danger snakes have posed to us over millions of years.

E3 Episode 3: How the Rise of Social Insects Shrunk These Dinosaurs

• 10m
• Jan 27, 2022

We often think of dinosaurs as either preying on other dinos or mammals, or as plant-eaters -- but in ecosystems today, those aren’t the only two options. So why would we expect dinosaurs to have only been carnivores or herbivores, with the occasional omnivore thrown in the mix?

E4 Episode 4: How Vertebrates Got Teeth... And Lost Them Again

• 10m
• Feb 8, 2022

As revolutionary as teeth were, they would go on to disappear in some groups of vertebrates. But why?

E5 Episode 5: How Horses Went From Food To Friends

• 10m
• Feb 16, 2022

Do our modern horses descend from just one domesticated population, or did it happen many times, in many places? Answering these questions has been tricky, as we’ve needed to bring together evidence from art, archaeology, and ancient DNA…Because, as it turns out, the history of humans and horses has been a pretty wild ride.

E6 Episode 6: Why We Only Have Ten Toes (It's a Long Story)

• 10m
• Feb 23, 2022

Today, all mammals from humans to bats have five fingers or fewer. Yes, even whales, whose finger bones are hidden in their fins. Birds have four or fewer and amphibians get the best of both worlds, often having four digits on their “hands” and five on their “feet.” But no species of vertebrates have more than five digits, let alone eight!

E7 Episode 7: Sharks nearly went extinct 19 million years ago #shorts

• 1m
• Mar 2, 2022

There used to be SO MANY sharks...where did they go?

E8 Episode 8: Dire wolves aren’t wolves at all #shorts

• 1m
• Mar 3, 2022

Dire wolves aren’t actually wolves but what they are might be even cooler.

E9 Episode 9: Could humans survive if they traveled back in time 3 billion years? #shorts

• 1m
• Mar 4, 2022

Could humans survive during the Precambrian?

E10 Episode 10: Some trees are more closely related to broccoli than to other trees #shorts

• 1m
• Mar 7, 2022

Don’t be fooled by convergent evolution.

E11 Episode 11: Human knees are the worst and we have evolution to thank for that #shorts

• 1m
• Mar 8, 2022

Why do human knees suck?

E12 Episode 12: A crater in Turkmenistan has been on fire for about 50 years #shorts

• 1m
• Mar 10, 2022

And it’s been reported that one of the geologists started it on purpose?

E13 Episode 13: When a Giant Pterosaur Ruled the European Islands

• 10m
• Mar 15, 2022

The ecological niche of apex predators was empty on Hateg Island, waiting to be occupied by something large, mobile, and powerful enough to fill it.

E14 Episode 14: Only one human has been excavated from the La Brea Tar Pits #shorts

• 1m
• Mar 17, 2022

E15 Episode 15: Could humans survive a giant space rock colliding with Earth 66 million years ago? #shorts

• 1m
• Mar 18, 2022

Would you have survived the K-Pg Impact?

E16 Episode 16: The Sudden Rise of the First Colossal Animal

• 10m
• Mar 22, 2022

A truly enormous ichthyosaur around the size of a modern sperm whale, reached its size within just a few million years of taking to the water - a blink of an eye in evolutionary time.

E17 Episode 17: The Tasmanian tiger is definitely extinct. So why do people keep report sightings of them? #shorts

• 1m
• Mar 25, 2022

Thylacines are definitely extinct!

E18 Episode 18: The Extreme Hyenas That Didn't Last

• 10m
• Mar 29, 2022

Hyenas weren’t always able to eat bones. In fact, only a few million years ago, they lived very different lives.

E19 Episode 19: Who forged one of the most famous fake fossils of all time? #shorts

• 1m
• Mar 31, 2022

E20 Episode 20: After this bird went extinct the first time, evolution just hit replay #shorts

• 1m
• Apr 4, 2022

The bird that evolved twice!

E21 Episode 21: Someone lost the only fossil from what might’ve been the biggest dinosaur ever #shorts

• 1m
• Apr 5, 2022

E22 Episode 22: Would you have survived the biggest mass extinction of all time? #shorts

• 1m
• Apr 6, 2022

E23 Episode 23: An ancient insect trapped in amber has a parasitic mushroom erupting out of it? #shorts

• 1m
• Apr 8, 2022

I will pass on the parasitic mind-controlling mushroom, thanks

E24 Episode 24: How the Smallest Animal Got So Simple

• 8m
• Apr 13, 2022

We tend to think that evolution only goes in one direction— toward getting bigger and more advanced. But that’s not always the case. This tiny, simple animal, the Myxozoans, (yes, animal!) evolved from something bigger and more complex.

E25 Episode 25: We know a lot about dinosaurs but...what was the first dinosaur? #shorts

• 1m
• Apr 14, 2022

E26 Episode 26: Why Sour May Be The Oldest Taste

• 8m
• Apr 20, 2022

While sour taste's original purpose was to warn vertebrates of danger, in a few animal groups, including us, its role has reversed. The taste of danger became something it was dangerous for us to avoid.

E27 Episode 27: The Ancient Human Species With A Missing Body

• 10m
• Apr 27, 2022

Only a handful of Denisovan fossils have been identified. In the absence of actual body fossils, it’s impossible for us to reconstruct their morphology, right?

E28 Episode 28: Are there dinosaur fossils in space? #shorts

• 1m
• May 2, 2022

E29 Episode 29: Why don’t rabbits get really, really big? #shorts

• 1m
• May 3, 2022

E30 Episode 30: An extinct human species was discovered deep within a cave system #shorts

• 1m
• May 4, 2022

E31 Episode 31: When Ants Domesticated Fungi

• 10m
• May 10, 2022

While we’ve been farming for around 10,000 to 12,000 years, the ancestors of ants have been doing it for around 60 million years. So when, and how, and why did ants start … farming?

E32 Episode 32: The Curious Case of the Cave Lion

• 9m
• May 17, 2022

A mysterious, large feline roamed Eurasia during the last ice age. Its fossils have been found across the continent, and it’s been the subject of ancient artwork. So what exactly were these big cats?

E33 Episode 33: Is This The Oldest Dad In The Fossil Record?

• 8m
• May 26, 2022

Fossil evidence suggests Diictodon used burrows to breed, and that a parent stayed behind to feed and protect their young. And the parent that stayed behind? It might’ve been the male.

E34 Episode 34: Why did so many predators die at the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry? #shorts

• 1m
• May 27, 2022

There’s something weird going on at the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry in what’s now Utah.

E35 Episode 35: What is the most successful human species? #shorts

• 1m
• May 31, 2022

Does Homo erectus beat out Homo sapiens?

E36 Episode 36: Sharks have antibacterial skin. Can we use that to save lives? #shorts

• 1m
• Jun 1, 2022

Sometimes modern problems require ancient, evolutionary solutions.

E37 Episode 37: This Ice Age pup's last meal was a woolly rhino #shorts

• 1m
• Jun 2, 2022

What was this ancient pup’s last meal?

E38 Episode 38: What came first, the sabertooth or the cat? #shorts

• 1m
• Jun 3, 2022

The newest oldest saber-toothed mammal

E39 Episode 39: How To Build A Woolly Mammoth (But Should We?)

• 8m
• Jun 8, 2022

In the quest to understand how evolution basically built the woolly mammoth, we may have found the blueprints for building them ourselves.

E40 Episode 40: Something Has Been Making This Mark For 500 Million Years

• 11m
• Jun 15, 2022

Paleodictyon, a hexagonal-patterned fossil, is a bit of a mystery. We don’t even know if it’s a trace fossil, or the organism itself. So… what could it be?

E41 Episode 41: Giant Viruses Blur The Line Between Alive and Not

• 10m
• Jun 29, 2022

In 2003, microbiologists made a huge discovery. One that would force us to reconsider a lot of what we thought we knew about the evolution of microbial life: giant viruses.

E42 Episode 42: This new giant bacterium is visible to the naked eye #shorts

• 1m
• Jul 6, 2022

Microbiology goes macro with a new giant bacterium!

E43 Episode 43: Another Spinosaurus study, another opportunity to debate if Spinosaurus was aquatic #shorts

• 1m
• Jul 7, 2022

Spinosaurus had dense bones!

E44 Episode 44: There were dinosaurs with basically no arms at all, just hands! #shorts

• 1m
• Jul 8, 2022

Guemesia: a new no-arm dino

E45 Episode 45: When Giant Millipedes Reigned

• 8m
• Jul 13, 2022

This giant millipede was the largest known invertebrate to ever live on land. So how did it get so big??

E46 Episode 46: How Plate Tectonics Transformed Los Angeles

• 14m
• Jul 21, 2022

Despite the profound changes we’ve made here in recent history, the epic saga of Los Angeles' natural history is still visible - and even striking - if you know where and how to look for it.

E47 Episode 47: Why Does Caffeine Exist?

• 11m
• Jul 28, 2022

Today, billions of people around the world start their day with caffeine. But how and why did the ability to produce this molecule independently evolve in multiple, distantly-related lineages of flowering plants, again and again?

E48 Episode 48: This was the biggest earthquake humans ever experienced #shorts

• 1m
• Aug 3, 2022

One of the biggest earthquakes humans ever experienced happened around 3800 years ago in what's now northern Chile.

E49 Episode 49: Someone stole two of the most important documents in the history of science #shorts

• 1m
• Aug 3, 2022

We have no idea where they were all this time, or who stole and returned them and why.

E50 Episode 50: You can thank evolution for flesh-eating bees #shorts

• 1m
• Aug 5, 2022

Flesh-eating bees exist!

E51 Episode 51: This is one of the oldest art workshops ever discovered! #shorts

• 1m
• Aug 5, 2022

Archaeologists have discovered an ancient art workshop

E52 Episode 52: Did An Ancient Pathogen Reshape Our Cells?

• 9m
• Aug 11, 2022

There is one - and only one - group of mammals that doesn’t have alpha-gal: the catarrhine primates, which are the monkeys of Africa and Asia, the apes, and us.

E53 Episode 53: How Whale Evolution Kind Of Sucked

• 11m
• Aug 18, 2022

Mystacodon is the earliest known mysticete, the group that, today, we call the baleen whales. But if this was a baleen whale, where was its baleen? Where did baleen come from? And how did it live without it?

E54 Episode 54: The Fungi That Turned Ants Into Zombies

• 9m
• Aug 23, 2022

This fungus was actually manipulating ants’ movements, forcing them to do something they’d never ordinarily do, something strange, yet specific…

E55 Episode 55: Did you know that fossils can get sick? #shorts

• 1m
• Aug 31, 2022

Did you know that fossils can get sick? – Specifically with Pyrite Disease

E56 Episode 56: A supervolcano in Idaho once caused a disaster 900 miles away. #shorts

• 1m
• Sep 8, 2022

Disaster in the great plains!

E57 Episode 57: A bunch of very important fossils disappeared during WWII. #shorts

• 1m
• Sep 9, 2022

80 years ago, a bunch of fossils of ancient humans disappeared.

E58 Episode 58: Did this animal poop cubes? Giant cubes? #shorts

• 1m
• Sep 13, 2022

Congrats! You just found a wombat burrow. And the cubes are its poop.

E59 Episode 59: Are wisdom teeth a problem for us because of evolution? Or because of our development? #shorts

• 1m
• Sep 14, 2022

Wisdom teeth can be such a pain

E60 Episode 60: Our extinct relative was an ancient leopard’s lunch. #shorts

• 1m
• Sep 16, 2022

Paranthropus got chomped by a leopard

E61 Episode 61: When did we start wearing clothes? #shorts

• 1m
• Sep 17, 2022

We didn’t always wear clothes!

E62 Episode 62: Did Megalodon go after whale faces specifically? #shorts

• 1m
• Sep 22, 2022

Ancient sperm whale heads belonged on every shark-cuterie board

E63 Episode 63: Where Did Water Come From?

• 12m
• Sep 27, 2022

Mercury, Venus, and Mars are all super low on water – so where did ours come from and why do we have so much of it? We think our water came from a few unlikely sources: meteorites, space dust, and even the sun.

E64 Episode 64: Our Ancient Relative That Said 'No Thanks' To Life On Land

• 10m
• Oct 4, 2022

Around the time that some of our fishapod relatives were crawling out of the water, others were turning around and diving right back in.

E65 Episode 65: Imagine a cat's mouth fully covering up their saber teeth. #shorts

• 1m
• Oct 5, 2022

We might’ve been wrong about how this saber-toothed cat looked

E66 Episode 66: Darwin correctly predicted an animal existed without ever seeing it. #shorts

• 1m
• Oct 7, 2022

Sometimes evolution is completely predictable.

E67 Episode 67: Neandertals weren’t dumb cavemen. In lots of ways, they were just like us. #shorts

• 1m
• Oct 10, 2022

Shanidar 1 got by with a little help from his friends

E68 Episode 68: Here are two ways to get a fossil species named after you. #shorts

• 1m
• Oct 14, 2022

Here are two ways to get a fossil species named after you.