Tag: PBS Eons
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PBS Eons: Did Ancient Storms Kill These Pterosaurs?
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the pterosaur diversity of the Solnhofen formation in Germany.
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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 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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PBS Eons: That Time Sharks Got Weird
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the “Age of Sharks” or should it be the “Age of Weird Sharks”. Long before the rise of the great whites and hammerheads we know today, sharks and their cartilaginous relatives ruled Earth’s oceans and rivers in astonishing variety. It was the golden age of…
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PBS Eons: That Time the Earth Was Sticky
PBS Eons has a new episode. This is about Cretaceous amber… what it is, how it forms, and what is found in it. The Cretaceous Resinous Interval, a 54-million year period where amber was preserved in hundreds of locations across the world, was a gooey, gummy point in Earth’s history – and then amber suddenly…
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PBS Eons: The Dinosaurs Too Big to Be Dinosaurs
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons on Youtube. This one is about big dinosaurs… really BIG dinosaurs. How did sauropods, uniquely large land animals, actually live, with their anatomy and physiology pushed to such extremes? Well, their unprecedented gigantism came with some equally massive costs…
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PBS Eons: There’s An Invisible Ocean Between These Fossils
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about trilobites and what they show us about the history of the Earth’s continents. This is the hundred-year tale of how an unlikely bunch of bottom-dwelling marine critters helped reveal that ocean basins are basically reincarnated every few hundred million years.
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PBS Eons: Pandas in North America?
PBS Eons has a new video. Pandas in America?!? How? How did a relative of the red panda end up in North America? What can this tell us about how long ago – and how many times – North America was connected to Europe and Asia?
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PBS Eons: Will We Survive The Future? (with John Green)
PBS Eons has another of their long form videos. This one is about the future… will we survive? Just because our ancestors have made it through every major period of upheaval in the Earth’s history so far doesn't mean that our survival through future changes is guaranteed. Humans have become a force of nature, but…
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PBS Eons: The Graveyard at the Center of the Earth
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about plate tectonics… how and why. Scientists have been trying to solve the mystery of why plate tectonics works the way it does for over a hundred years. And they might have just uncovered a key to cracking it.
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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: What Killed These Sleeping Dinosaurs?
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the fossils of Liaoning in northwestern China… amazingly, beautifully preserved dinosaurs that give us insight into dinosaur and bird evolution. Since the 1990s, paleontologists have been pulling 125-million-year-old complete dinosaur skeletons from the rocks of the Lujiatun in Northwestern China, most seemingly posed in perfect…
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PBS Eons: Did Asteroids Spark Life?
PBS Eons has a new video. This one is about the very early history of the Earth, a period called the Hadean. How did the building blocks of life form? Harold Miller did some experiments in the 1950s attempting to recreate the conditions. The impacts of a large asteroid might have provided the perfect condition…
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PBS Eons: Life and Death on Tiny-Dino Island
PBS Eons has another episode of their long form video series "Surviving Deep Time" This time they go to Hațeg island during the late Cretaceous. The domain of Hatzegopteryx thambema, the huge azhdarchid pterosaur. Could you survive? There was an island in the Late Cretaceous Period in the fragmented European archipelago that turned out to be…
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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 End-Triassic?
PBS Eons has a new episode of their “Surviving Deep Time” podcast. This one is about the Triassic/Jurassic mass extinction. This is the extinction event that lines up with the break up of Pangaea. In the aftermath of the Great Dying, rapid evolutionary radiation resulted in the rise of a bunch of weird creatures in…
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PBS Eons: When the Amazon Flowed Backwards
There's a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about the Amazon River. What did life look like when the Amazon watershed flowed backwards? How did its direction shape the evolution of life around it? And what force could have possibly been strong enough to up-end one of the world’s mightiest rivers between then…
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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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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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PBS Eons: Could You Survive The Carboniferous Period?
There's a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about the coal swamps of the late Carboniferous Period. The swamps of the Late Carboniferous Period teemed with giant insects, but it’s time for the amniotes – the ancestors of all reptiles, birds, and mammals to come – to earn the title of Fully Terrestrial…
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PBS Eons: What Happened To The Other Mesozoic Mammals?
There's a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about the rise of modern mammals through the Cretaceous Period. In 2003, a fossil belonging to a mammaliaform was discovered in an ancient lakebed in what's now China. It was an almost complete skeleton the size of a platypus, a find that complicated the history…
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PBS Eons: Could You Survive The Ordovician Period?
PBS Eons has another episode. This one is about the Ordovician period… could you survive the Earth's first mass extinction? The End-Ordovician Extinction was the first of the so-called ‘Big Five’ mass extinctions in the history of life on Earth – more than 80% of species in the oceans died out. But could you survive…
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PBS Eons: Could You Survive the Cambrian Explosion?
There's a new episode of PBS Eons. This one discusses whether you could survive in the Cambrian Period, some 500 million years ago. What would you eat? Could you breathe? In the ocean, the Cambrian Period was one of startling evolutionary innovations, but on land, it was barren, with no vegetation of any kind. In…
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PBS Eons: How the Himalayas Changed the World
There's a new episode of PBS Eons. This one explains how the Himalayan orogeny has affected the whole Earth over the last 50 million years. The rise of the Himalayas affected more than just the immediate area. Turns out, we may have them to thank for everything from the rise of giant flightless birds in…
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PBS Eons: Could You Survive The Devonian Period? (with Hank Green!)
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one dsicusses whether humas could survive in the Devonian Period. By the end of the Devonian Period, the land had exploded with plant life and ancient invertebrates. There was also Tiktaalik – one of the first known vertebrates able and willing to move from the water to land.…
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PBS Eons: How the Elephant got its Trunk
There’s a new episode PBS Eons. This one is about the evolution of a flexible trunk in elephants. Long-jawed proboscideans were doing pretty well for themselves. That is, until they were all rapidly replaced with proboscideans with long, flexible trunks instead: mammoths, mastodons, and our modern elephants. What suddenly made long jaws such a liability?…
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PBS Eons: What Was The First Beverage?
PBS has a new episode. This one is about the development drink… when did we start drinking alternatives to water? When exactly did we start drinking other things, and why? To find out, we have to look at the world’s oldest beverages – which might not be what you expect.
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PBS Eons: How Long Have We Been Caring For Each Other?
PBS Eons has another interesting video. This one is about the development of medical care. When did practicing medicine – in its varied, complex forms (from sharing medicinal plants to the earliest surgeries) – become something that we actually started doing? While it’s a hard question to answer, it’s possible that our tendency to heal…
