Tag: PBS Eons
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PBS Eons: How Ancient Whales May Have Changed the Deep Ocean
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about how whales changed the ocean. It looks like the evolution of ocean-going whales like Borealodon may have affected communities found in the deep ocean, like the ones found around geothermal vents. And it turns out that when a whale dies, that’s just the beginning…
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PBS Eons: Fossil Feud: Eons vs SciShow!
There's a new episode of PBS Eons. It's a quiz show content with their take on Family Feud… PBS Eons vs SciShow! This is their celebration of National Fossil Day. You’ve heard of Family Feud… but how about Fossil Feud? Join us for a National Fossil Day livestream to watch the Eons team compete…
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PBS Eons: When Mammals Only Went Out At Night
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons over on Youtube. This one is about mammal evolution and our adaptations for being active at night. For decades, scientists believed dinosaurs were diurnal and tiny mammals were nocturnal. But as researchers have uncovered more mammalian fossils and studied the biology of different dinosaur species, they’ve found…
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PBS Eons: How a Mass Extinction Event Created the Amazon
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons over on Youtube. This one is about the mass extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous and how it helped to create the Amazon rain forest. The Amazon rainforest of South America is a paradise for flowering plants. But long ago, the landscape that we now…
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PBS Eons: How a Supervolcano Ignited an Evolutionary Debate
PBS Eons has a new episode about the eruption of the supervolcano Toba. About 74,000 years ago, ancient humans, in Africa, suffered an evolutionary bottleneck. It seems Toba erupted at around the same time, was it the cause? The research is not clear. The Toba supervolcano was the biggest explosive eruption of the last 2.5…
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PBS Eons: How Pollination Got Going Twice
PBS Eons has a new episode on Youtube. This one is about how pollination by insects evolved twice. The world of the Jurassic was a lot like ours – similar interactions between plants and insects were happening, but the players have changed over time. Because it looks like pollination by insects actually got going…
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PBS Eons: The Creature That Stumped Darwin
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about Toxodon and its evolutionary history. Toxodon was one of the last members of a lineage that vanished 11,000 years ago after thriving in isolation for millions of years. And its fossils would inspire a revolutionary thinker to tackle a bigger mystery than Toxodon itself:…
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PBS Eons: How the Starfish got its Arms
PBS Eons has a new episode over on Youtube. This one is about echinoderm evolution… how the starfish got its arms. The story of how the starfish got its arms reminds us that even animals that might be familiar to us today can have incredibly deep histories – ones that stretch back almost half…
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PBS Eons: Where Are All the Medium-Sized Dinosaurs?
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about T. rex and the other carnivores that lived (or didn’t live) along side them. The remains of medium-sized predatory dinosaurs are pretty rare in places where giant predators like T. rex existed. Which is weird, because that’s just not how ecosystems work today.
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PBS Eons: The Island of the Last Surviving Mammoths
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the last surviving mammoths, who survived until just a few thousand years ago. The Wrangel Island mammoths would end up being the final survivors of a once-widespread genus. In their final years, after having thrived in many parts of the world for millions of…
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PBS Eons: The Traits That Spawned the Age of Mammals
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about early mammals… when and how did mammals arise? 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 cases, they show up a lot earlier and in things that…
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PBS Eons: Did These Giant Sloths Poop Themselves to Death?
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about a mysterious giant sloth bone bed in Euador. There is asphalt present… was it a trap? Check out Animal IQ: https://youtu.be/Ft9nFhEjGiE At Tanque Loma, at least 22 giant ground sloths in the genus Eremotherium met their end. Of the five hypotheses that researchers proposed…
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PBS Eons: Where Are All The Squid Fossils?
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about squids and discusses taphonomy and what happened to their missing fossils. Check out Otherwords, a new show about language & linguistics! https://youtu.be/d2UccTPnl4w It might surprise you but cephalopods have a pretty good fossil record, with one major exception. If squids were swimming around in…
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PBS Eons: How Weasels Got Skinny
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about weasels and how they got their skinny body plan. Weasels have an extreme body plan that may push the boundaries of what’s metabolically possible. So when and how did this happen? Why’d the weasels get so skinny?
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PBS Eons: When Trees Took Over the World
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the first “trees”… hint, they didn’t look like trees back then. 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, except its roots were made of wood. Instead…
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PBS Eons: When Crocs Thrived in the Seas
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about some ferocious crocodiles that lived in the oceans during the Jurassic and Cretaceous. Check out Animal IQ: https://youtu.be/BXqGkPhU2VE While dinosaurs were dominating the land, the metriorhynchids were thriving in the seas. But taking that plunge wasn’t easy because it takes a very special…
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PBS Eons: How To Survive the Little Ice Age
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. Instead of northern Europe, this one looks at the little ice age in North America and how people survived. Nunalleq, a village in what’s today southwest Alaska, seemed to have thrived during the Little Ice Age. How did this village manage to survive and prosper during this…
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PBS Eons: How Chilis Got Spicy (and Why We Love the Burn)
PBS Eons has a new episode, which is about chili peppers. It looks at how and why they got hot? And, why do we love it… Today, chilis are the most widely cultivated spice crop in the world – grown everywhere from their native home in the Americas to Europe, Africa, and Asia. But…
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PBS Eons: How Humans Became (Mostly) Right-Handed
PBS Eons has a new episode over on Youtube. Why are the majority of humans right-handed? What evolutionary pressures led to it? No other placental mammal that we know of prefers one side of the body so consistently, not even our closest primate relatives. But being right-handed may have deep evolutionary roots in our…
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PBS Eons: How Worm Holes Ended Wormworld
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the Wormworld of the Ediacaran. Elongated tubes, flat ribbons, and other “worm-like” body plans were so varied and abundant that a part of the Ediacaran is sometimes known as Wormworld. But in the end, the ancient Wormworld was ended by the actions of its…
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PBS Eons: Our Bizarre, Possibly Venomous, Relative
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about venomous mammals. Check out Bizarre Beasts’ episode on venomous mammals! https://youtu.be/22qAEKXe8Lo This video contains images and video of snakes and spiders. It’s possible Euchambersia possessed venom about 20 million years before the first lizards and over 150 million years before the first snakes evolved.…
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PBS Eons: The Genes We Lost Along the Way
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about fossil genes. 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 not just defined by the genes that we’ve gained over the course of our evolution, but also by the…
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PBS Eons: The Return of Giant Skin-Shell Sea Turtles
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about one of the largest turtles that every lived… Archelon. The biggest turtle ever described wasn’t an ancestor of today’s leatherback turtles or any other living sea turtles. But it looks like there are some things about being a giant, skin-shelled sea turtle that just…
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PBS Eons: When We First Talked
PBS Eons has a new episode which talks about talking. When did humans first speak? 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 years to get to this moment where we can tell you about how it took several…
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PBS Eons: The Pandemic That Lasted 15 Million Years
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is very relevant as it’s about a fossil genes left from an ancient pandemic during the Eocene. Our DNA holds evidence of a huge, ancient pandemic, one that touched many different species, spanned the globe, and lasted for more than 15 million years. The paper we…
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PBS Eons: The Reign of the Hell Ants
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about the Hell Ants… an extinct group of ants that might give us clues about eusociality. 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, scythe-like jaw and a…
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PBS Eons: What Happened to the World’s Biggest Beaver?
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about Casteroides, which lived in North America up to about 10,000 years ago. It’s important to us that you understand how big this beaver was. Just like modern beavers, it was semiaquatic — it lived both on the land and in the water. The…
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PBS Eons: The Triassic Reptile With “Two Faces”
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about a strange reptile called Adapodentatus “unusual teeth” from the Triassic Lagerstätte of Luoping in China. It’s one of the rare animals that changed its diet from meat to plants. Figuring out what this creature’s face actually looked like would take paleontologists years. But understanding…
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PBS Eons: When the Earth Suddenly Stopped Warming
PBS Eons has a new episode about the end of the most recent ice age. It’s called the Younger Dryas period. And, it was a time when the global climate cooled after a period of warming. While we understand what happened, the cause of it has been a mystery. From ice lakes, to volcanoes,…
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PBS Eons: When Lizards Took Over the World
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the rise of the lizards. Lizards are incredibly widespread and diverse but it took them a long time to get to where they are now. Because they used to face some pretty stiff competition from a group of lizard look-alikes.
