Tag: evolution
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PBS Eons: Why Evolution Made Your Teeth Hurt
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about the evolution of teeth.
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PBS Eons: 130 Million Years Ago, the World Caught Fire
PBS Eons has a new video. This one is about the evolution of flowering plants. It seems that for flowering plants to take over the world, first they may have had to help burn the old one away…and then put those fires out.
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PBS Eons: When Ancient Weeds Fooled Us
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about evolution of weeds. Ancient weeds began mimicking early crops again and again over the course of the agricultural revolution, as ancient farmers made similar mistakes in different places at different times.And it turns out, some of our closest plant friends today actually started out as…
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PNAS: Can paleontologists pinpoint the dawn of the dinosaurs?
PNAS has an interesting news feature about the origin of the dinosaurs. When and where did they first appear? Evidence points to an amimal known as Lewisuchus admixtus that lived in what is now Argentina about 236 million years ago. There’s a small, but fierce, jawbone in Argentina’s national natural science museum in Buenos Aires.…
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PBS Eons: How Brawn Led to Brains
PBS Eons has a new video. This one is about the evolution of brains. While we often think of brains as some kind of triumph over brawn, it turns out that those two things might not be mutually exclusive, and in fact, they’ve been linked for far longer than we might imagine. PBS Member Stations…
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PBS Eons: When a Tiny Land Bridge Triggered an Ice Age
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about the origin of Panama and how it changed the world. On land, the Isthmus of Panama kicked off possibly the greatest natural experiment in the history of life on Earth. In the water, this narrow strip of land did something completely different: it divided.…
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PBS Eons: What Was Greenland Like When it Was Green
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about 2 million year old DNA from Greenland. It made the front page of the New York Times. Ancient DNA over 2 million years old, retrieved from the frozen dirt of Greenland. It reached back further in time than many scientists used to think was even…
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This Fossil Is Rewriting the Story of How Plants Spread across the Planet
Scientific American Magazine has an interesting story about the spread of terrestrial plants during the Early Devonian Period. A paper in the journal Science Advances looked at the origin of lichens. Did they appear before or after the rise of vascular plants? Lichens, which are a composite organism resulting from a symbiotic relationship between a…
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PBS Eons: How Chewing May Have Beat Extinction
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about teeth and chewing and how they may have helped mammals survive after the K-Pg extinction. Help understand what you enjoy and what you would want to see us make more of: https://to.pbs.org/2025SurveyEons 66 million years ago, after an asteroid slammed into the Earth and…
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Discovery of First Fossil Hand Linked to P. Boisei Suggests the Bygone Human Relative Could Have Used Tools
Smithsonian Magazine has a story about tool use in our ancient cousins. A recent discovery of the first hand and foot bones on Paranthropus boisei has shed light on whether the species was able to use tools. The research was published in the journal Nature. “The authors make a compelling case that this individual would…
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PBS Eons: When We Left The Water (By Accident)
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about when tetrapods moved from the water onto land… It’s beginning to look like our success on land, and that of all tetrapods, from frogs to dogs to dinosaurs, was just a lucky side-effect of fish trying to stay fish.
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PBS Eons: We’re The Only Ones With Chins – And We Don’t Know Why
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about chins and how/why it fits into human evolution. Check out the first episode of Human: https://to.pbs.org/HumanNOVA You share a trait with every single human who’s ever lived – but no other animal on Earth has it. It’s not your big brain, or your opposable thumbs……
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How Did Hands Evolve? The Answer Is Behind You.
Carl Zimmer has an interesting post about the evolution of hands. It appears it all started about 360 million years ago… Now the precise DNA-editing technology known as CRISPR is letting scientists reconstruct this ancient evolutionary change in molecular detail. It turns out that hands and feet were not the products of new genes doing new things.…
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PBS NOVA: Human Origins
PBS NOVA has a new 5 part series running on their website and Youtube. The first episode is called “Human Origins”. Check it out! Trace the remarkable origin story of Homo sapiens and the crucial moments that shaped our species. Official website: https://to.pbs.org/46djrws | #novapbs Where do we come from? To find out, journey back…
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How evolution works | Dave Hone and Lex Fridman | on Youtube
David Hone was on the Lex Fridman podcast discussing evolution. Dave Hone is a paleontologist, expert on dinosaurs, co-host of the Terrible Lizards podcast, and author of numerous scientific papers and books on the behavior and ecology of dinosaurs. He lectures at Queen Mary University of London on topics of Ecology, Zoology, Biology, and Evolution.
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Giant Dinosaurs Were Riddled With a Devastating Disease, Fossils Show
Science Alert has a piece about dinosaurs… sauropods might not have been all that healthy. The animals that lived in what is now Brazil, might have suffered from bone infections caused by bacterium, fungus, virus, or parasite.
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PBS NOVA – Great Mammoth Mystery
PBS NOVA just published the “Great Mammoth Mystery” on Youtube. Sir David Attenborough investigates a unique site in southern England where amateur fossil hunters uncovered giant mammoth bones and evidence of Neanderthals. A team of paleontologists and archaeologists soon discover that the site preserves rare evidence of the extinct beasts and early human inhabitants of…
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150-Million-Year-Old Stegosaurus Skull Rewrites Dinosaur Evolution
SciTechDaily has an article about a stegasaur skull discovered in Spain. Stegasaur skulls are rarely found due to the extreme fragility of their bone. This new speciec, Dacentrurus armatus, was found near Villar del Arzobispo Formation and is nearly complete. The rock formation dates to the late Jurassic about 150 million years ago. The research…
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ScienceNews: The first cicada concert was 47 million years ago
ScienceNews has a story about the first cicada concert. Fossil cicadas from Messel Pit in Germany suggests the first singing cicadas date to the Eocene some 47 million years ago. The fossil of Eoplatypleura messelensis, was collected around 1986 and identified as a cicada in 1988. Unfortunately, the researchers didn’t realize it was the oldest singing…
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Harvard Scientists Solve 100-Year Mystery of Bizarre 508-Million-Year-Old Arthropod
SciTechDaily has an article about the strange arthropod Helmetia expansa. H. expansa was discovered by Charles Doolittle Walcott in 1918 in the Burgess Shale. It was initially identifed as a crustacean, however, it was never described. A new paper, in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, describes Helmetia expansa as a concilitergans, a group closely related…
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PBS Eons: Darwin’s Unexpected Final Obsession
https://youtu.be/hEkbSV8aYrs PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about Charles Darwin and his quest to understand… worms. After having solved the small matter of evolution by natural selection – becoming one of the most famous scientists in the world in the process – Charles Darwin turned his focus to a different personal obsession……
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Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals
Quanta Magazine has an interesting piece about the evolution of intelligence. A variety of nonhuman species display intelligent behavior and advanced cognitive abilities. When did it evolve? Were the basic neural pathways inherited from a common ancestor or did it evolve separately in a case of convergent evolution? A series of studies published in the…
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Refuge from the worst mass extinction in Earth’s history discovered fossilized in China
Live Science has an interesting piece about refugia during the “Great Dying”. The End Permian mass extinction was Earth’s worst with an an estimated 80% of life going extinct. A new paper “Refugium amidst ruins: Unearthing the lost flora that escaped the end-Permian mass extinction” in the journal Science Advances, describes a refuge from the…
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PBS Eons: The Arms Race That Made Insects Take Flight
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the co-evolution of spiders and insects. Spiders and their ancestors have been driving an arms race that began before either stepped foot onto land and resulted in the first powered flight on Earth.
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PBS Eons: How Mountains Make Evolution Weird
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about how barriers between populations can effect evolution. Mountains have a unique effect on diversity, messing with our understanding of animals through time, and pretty much just making evolution weird. And they would eventually reveal something even stranger about a group of mammals even closer to…
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PBS Eons: When Neandertals Became Apex Predators
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the Neandertals and how they lived. Climbing to the summit of the Eurasian food chain was one of the Neandertals’ most impressive evolutionary feats, but in the end, it may have actually been what doomed them.
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PBS Eons: Could You Survive The Great Dying?
PBS Eons has another interesting episode. This one is about the Permian Mass Extinction, which is often referred to as the "Great Dying" as more than 90% of all species went extinct during this event. The cause is thought to be massive flood basalt volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia about 250 million years…
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Paleontologists Discover a New Pterosaur, Filling a Key Gap on the Evolutionary Timeline for These Flying Reptiles
Smithsonian Magazine has highlighted the recent discovery of Skiphosoura bavarica, a Jurassic pterosaur from Germany. This research was led by David Hone a paleontologist at Queen Mary University of London. Long-time ESCONI members Bruce and Rene’ Lauer were co-authors on the study. The paper was published in the journal Current Biology. The paper introduces a…
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PBS Eons: How Animals Got Butts
There's a new episode of PBS Eons. Birds do it. Bees do it. Everyone and anything that eats does it… While the evolution of the butthole was a major breakthrough in animal development, its story might actually end with redefining what it means to have a butthole at all.
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A new and large monofenestratan reveals the evolutionary transition to the pterodactyloid pterosaurs
Bruce and Rene Lauer have done it again… groundbreaking paleontological research. This time it’s a new pterosaur, Skiphosoura bavarica, from the Jurassic of Germany. The lead author is David Hone with Adam Fitch, Stefan Selzer, and the Lauers. The paper is Open Access and was published in the journal Current Biology.
