Tag: PBS Eons
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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…
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PBS Eons: How Snake Venom Sparked An Evolutionary Arms Race
PBS Eons has a new episode over on Youtube. This one is about the co-evolution of venomous snakes and the rest of the animal kingdom. For some, the rise and spread of venomous elapids was just another challenge to adapt to. For others, it was a catastrophe of almost apocalyptic proportions. And we humans are…
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PBS Eons: Why Is It So Hard to Tell the Sex of a Dinosaur?
PBS Eons has a new episode over on Youtube. How do you hold a gender reveal for dinosaurs. While we think we know a lot about dinosaurs – like how they moved and what they ate – for a long time, we haven’t been able to ID one seemingly basic thing about their biology… Which…
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PBS Eons: Animals Might Be Much Older Than We Thought
PBS Eons has a new episode. This interesting video is about the origin of complex life. When did animals first show up? How long before the Cambian Explosion did complex life arrive on Earth. What are animal-like fossils doing in rocks a billion years old, and what does that mean for our understanding of their…
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PBS Eons: Our Most Mysterious Extinct Cousins
There's a new episode of PBS Eons. Paranthropus robustus and related species lived and evolved along side of us around 1 – 2 million years ago. What happened to them? There was a group of hominins, those creatures more closely related to us than to chimpanzees, that did take a different, parallel journey from our…
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PBS Eons: How Ancient Microbes Rode Bug Bits Out to Sea
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the evolution of microbes and how it might be connected to the evolution of the chiton exoskeletons of arthropods. Tiny exoskeleton fragments may have allowed some of the most important microbes in the planet’s history to set sail out into the open ocean and change…
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PBS Eons: Why Only Earth Has Fire
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the evolution of our planet’s atmosphere and how life makes fire possible. To get fire, which exists only on Earth, it took billions of years of photosynthesis – which means fire can’t exist without life. And fire and life have been shaping each other ever…
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PBS Eons: Beans & Bees (Not Bats) Gave Us Butterflies
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the origin of butterflies. Turns out, instead of having bats to thank for the existence of butterflies, the groups we should actually be thanking are…bees and beans.
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PBS Eons: The Huge Extinctions We Are Just Now Discovering
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about ocean extinctions during the Silurian Period. It wasn't the quiet time that was once thought. What graptolites tell us is a story of incredible changes in the ocean, of periods where the oceans became poisonous and suffocating before eventually clearing up again. They unlock extinctions…
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PBS Eons: When Did We Stop Being Naked?
PBS Eons has a new episode. Where and when did we start wearing clothes? Of course, the ancient Egyptians were probably not the first people to ever wear clothing, but we haven’t found any clothes older than the Tarkhan Dress. So how can we figure out when we first started wearing clothes? Well, it turns…
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PBS Eons: You’re Living On An Ant Planet
PBS Eons has a new episode over on Youtube. We are all living on an ant world…. How did ants take over the world? Well, it looks like they didn’t achieve world domination all by themselves. They may have just been riding the wave of a totally different evolutionary explosion.
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PBS Eons: Did a Tsunami Swallow Part of Europe?
PBS Eons has a new video on Youtube. This one is about the England…what happened to Doggerland? What was it and how did it disappear? What happened to the piece of prime prehistoric real estate known as Doggerland? While a massive megatsunami might have drowned it for good, the underlying reason that it now lies…
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PBS Eons: We Helped Make Mosquitoes A Problem
PBS Eons has a new video on Youtube. This one is about the pesky mosquitoes. Around 6,000 years ago, in the Sahel region of Africa, a lone female mosquito buzzed through the lush, green savannah. She couldn’t know it, but the planet itself was about to change in ways that would see her descendants evolve…
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PBS Eons: Why The Giraffe Got Its Neck
PBS Eons has a new video on Youtube. This one is about the evolution of long necks in giraffes. How and why the giraffe's neck emerged in the first place has been a mystery that generations of biologists have argued over – one that has made us reconsider our understanding of how evolution actually works…
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PBS Eons: A Natural History of Mars
PBS Eons has a new episode on Youtube. This one is about Mars… how has it changed over the year? While Earth’s natural history has been playing out over the last few billion years, another epic planetary saga has also been unfolding right next door.
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PBS Eons: It’s Becoming Very Clear That Birds Are Not Normal
PBS Eons has a new video over on Youtube. Birds are wierd. A new discovery raises an important question: from an evolutionary perspective, who really has the stranger wings?
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PBS Eons: How (Some) Plants Survived The K-Pg Extinction
PBS Eons has a new video over on Youtube. This one is about Angiosperm plants and how many of them survived the K-Pg mass extinction. Perhaps for plants in times of great stress and ecological upheaval, the more DNA the better. Thanks to Franz Anthony (https://franzanth.com) for the incredible reconstruction of plants in the aftermath…
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PBS Eons: The Real Story Of The Dodo Bird’s (Current) Extinction
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one tells the whole story of the dodo bird. How did it evolve and how did it disappear? What’s the real story of the dodo? How did such a unique bird even evolve in the first place? And are we really responsible for its extinction?
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PBS Eons: Nautiloids Thrived For 500 Million Years Until These Guys Showed Up
PBS Eons has a new episode. Nautiloids were once much more common, then something happened to threaten their existence. Around 30 million years ago, a new group of predators began to push nautiloids from their former global range into a single remaining refuge. But who were these predators?
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PBS Eons: Does Our “Junk” DNA Make Us Human?
PBS Eons has a new episode on Youtube. This one is about us and what is it that makes us, us. In the search for the genes that make us human, some of the most important answers were hiding not in the genes themselves, but in what was once considered genomic junk.
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PBS Eons: That Time the American West Blew Up
PBS Eons has a new video on Youtube. This one is about volcanism in North America during the Eocene Epoch some 50 million years ago. Why didn't these supervolcanoes produce extinction? How is it possible to have cataclysmic eruptions without any real cataclysm?
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PBS Eons: How a Mass Extinction Changed Our Brains
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the evolution of the mammal brain. During one of the most pivotal moments in our evolutionary story our brains actually shrank relative to our bodies.
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PBS Eons: Is This A Theropod? A Sauropod? A Third Thing?
PBS Eons has a new episode on Youtube. This one is about therizinosaurs and where they fit into the dinosaur family tree. How the therizinosaurs lived and evolved ended up being just as weird as their mixed-up anatomy.
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PBS Eons: These Fossils Were Supposed To Be Impossible
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the earliest animals, which evolved during a period of the Pre-Cambrian called the Ediacaran. Hidden in rocks once thought too old to contain complex life we may have found the animal kingdom’s oldest known predator.
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PBS Eons: What If Neandertals Buried Their Dead?
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the Neanderthals and how they lived… and died. They cared for their sick and disabled, so I feel its not ridiculous to think that they very much buried their dead. They had compassion, surely they wanted to say goodbye to their loved ones and probably…
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PBS Eons: When Our Culture Changed Our DNA
PBS Eons has a new episode on Youtube. This one is about the complex mix of culture, biology, and evolution. Thanks to our ability to develop and share complex learned behaviors across generations – a thing we sometimes call culture – we have become the ultimate niche builders.
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PBS Eons: The Extinct Human Species Found In Remote Cave Chambers
There's a new episode of PBS Eons over on Youtube. This one is about human evolution… the discovery of Homo naledi in a cave in Africa back in 2013. Deep in the Rising Star Cave system lies a mystery of paleoanthropology: a chamber filled with the bones of Homo naledi.
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PBS Eons: How Did Lucy Live and Die?
There's a new episode of PBS Eons on Youtube, The live and death of Lucy, who is the Australopithecus discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, says much about human evolution. She lived about 3.2 million years ago. Did our most famous fossil ancestor, Lucy, die by falling out of a tall tree? The answer is…
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PBS Eons: We Met Neandertals Way Earlier Than We Thought
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the missing Neandertal Y chromosome. My cousin did a DNA test the other month and was embarrassed about having a much higher amount of Neandertal DNA than the average European, but I told them about all the cool things I learned about them on this…
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PBS Eons: How Plate Tectonics Gave Us Seahorses
PBS Eons has a new episode on Youtube. This one is about the evolution of the seahorse. How did seahorses — one of the ocean’s worst swimmers — spread around the globe? And where did they come from in the first place? Thanks to Franz Anthony (http://franzanth.com) for the incredible syngnathid reconstructions used in this…
