Tag: PBS Eons
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PBS Eons: How Humans Lost Their Fur
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons on Youtube. This one is about humans and how we lost our fur. We’re the only primate without a coat of thick fur. It turns out that this small change in our appearance has had huge consequences for our ability to regulate our body temperature, and ultimately,…
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PBS Eons: The Rise and Fall of the Tallest Mammal to Walk the Earth
PBS Eons has a new episode over on Youtube. This one is about the tallest land mammal that every lived – Paraceratherium. It arose from rhino ancestors that were a lot smaller, but Paraceratherium would take a different evolutionary path. Believe it or not, it actually became so big that it probably got close…
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PBS Eons: How Plankton Created A Bizarre Giant of the Seas
PBS Eons has a new episode over on Youtube. This one is about anomalocaris… a giant anomalocaris called Aegirocassis. At more than 2 meters long, Aegirocassis was not only the biggest radiodont ever, but it also may have been the biggest animal in the Early Ordovician. This bizarre marine giant may have only been…
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PBS Eons: Why Do Things Keep Evolving Into Crabs?
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about all things crab and why animals keep evolving into the crab shapes. For some reason, animals keep evolving into things that look like crabs, independently, over and over again. What is it about the crab’s form that makes it so evolutionarily successful that non-crabs…
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PBS Eons: How Ankylosaurs Got Their Clubs
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about Ankylosaurs and how they got their clubs. While clubs are practically synonymous with ankylosaurs, we’ve only started to get to the bottom of how they worked and how this unusual anatomy developed in the first place.
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PBS Eons: The First and Last North American Primates
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. Did you know that primates actually evolved in North America? All the details here! Early primates not only lived in North America — our primate family tree actually originated here! So what happened to those early relatives of ours?
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PBS Eons: When Rodents Had Horns
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about horned rodents, more specifically horned gophers. When originally described, they were likened to miniature rhinoceros. These odd rodents belong to a genus known as Ceratogaulus, but they’re more commonly called horned gophers, because, you guessed it, they had horns. And it turns out the horns…
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PBS Eons: The Sea Monster from the Andes
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about a giant sea monster called Kronosaurus. In 1977, a farmer was plowing his field on a plateau high in the Andes mountains when he stumbled upon a giant fossilized skeleton. How did this giant marine reptile end up high in the Andes Mountains?
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PBS Eons: How Ancient Art Captured Australian Megafauna
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one connects archaeology, paleontology, and ancient art. Beneath layers of rock art are drawings of animals SO strange that, for a long time, some anthropologists thought they could only have been imagined. But what if these animals really had existed, after all?
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PBS Eons: The Oddest Couple in the Fossil Record
PBS Eons has a new episode over on Youtube. This one is about an interesting fossil of two early mammals that were entombed together for nearly 250 million years. To figure out how Thrinaxodon and Broomistega became entombed together, scientists looked at the burrow itself, along with their fossilized bones. And it looks like…
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PBS Eons: How We Figured Out Fermentation
PBS Eons has an episode on how we discovered beer, pickles and much, much, more! Thanks to a recent adaptation, instead of getting sick from the boozy, fermented fruits, one of our primate ancestors could digest them safely, and get more calories at the same time. This new superpower would open up a whole…
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PBS Eons: The Dinosaur Who Was Buried at Sea
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about an amazing specimen of Nodosaur discovered in Canada in 2011. It was found in a siderite concretion which formed in the ocean. Paleontologists have been studying nodosaurs since the 1830s, but nobody had ever found a specimen like Borealopelta before. The key to…
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Palaeocast Episode 113: PBS Eons Host Kallie Moore
Here’s a great Palaeocast podcast episode about a great YouTube channel, PBS Eons. The show is an interview with Kallie Moore, the Collections Manager at University of Montana Paleontology Center, who is one of the hosts of the show. Two of my favorite podcasts meet! With palaeontology as popular as it is you will never…
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PBS Eons: The Biggest Frog that Ever Lived
A new episode of PBS Eons is up over on Youtube. It’s about a huge frog from the Cretaceous! Untangling the origins of Beelzebufo — the giant frog that lived alongside the dinosaurs — turns out to be one of the most bedeviling problems in the history of amphibians.
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PBS Eons: The Story of the Dino Stampede
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. It’s about trace fossils and the how we can use them to understand what happened in the past. To try to solve the puzzle of Lark Quarry, experts have turned to a special subfield of paleontology — paleoichnology, or the study of trace fossils — to reconstruct…
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PBS Eons: How the Walrus Got Its Tusks
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about the walrus, where they came from and how they got their tusks. The rise and fall of ancient walruses, and how modern ones got their tusks, is a story that spans almost 20 million years. And while there are parts of the story that…
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PBS Eons: When Dinosaurs Chilled in the Arctic
Check out the new PBS Eons episode over on Youtube. This one is about dinosaurs in the Arctic. All told, the Arctic in the Cretaceous Period was a rough place to live, especially in winter. And yet, the fossils of many kinds of dinosaurs have been discovered there. So how were they able to…
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PBS Eons: The World Before Plate Tectonics
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about plate tectonics and how they got started. Ever hear of super continent Nuna? The video of plate movement is very cool! There was a time in Earth’s history that was so stable, geologists once called it the Boring Billion. But the fact is,…
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PBS Eons: When Dinosaur Look-Alikes Ruled the Earth
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about the crocodilians that evolved along side the dinosaurs during the Triassic Period. There were a huge number of croc-like animals that flourished during the Triassic Period. Dinosaurs had just arrived on the scene but it was these animals that truly ruled the Earth,…
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PBS Eons: How We Identified One of Earth’s Earliest Animals
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the oldest animals that dates back to the Precambrian during the Ediacaran. Scientists had no idea what type of organisms the life forms of the Ediacaran were—lichen, colonies of bacteria, fungi or something else. It turns out, the key to solving the puzzle of Precambrian…
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PBS Eons: The Two Viruses That We’ve Had For Millions of Years
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is very relevant… it’s about viruses. In this case, the herpes virus. There’s one kind of herpesvirus that’s specific to one species of primate, and each virus split off from the herpesvirus family tree when the primate split off from its own tree. But of…
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PBS Eons: How Plants Caused the First Mass Extinction
PBS Eons has a new episode. Climate change has been a large part of all the mass extinctions. The arrival of land plants has a huge impact on the climate and was quite likely a driving event. In the middle of the Cambrian, life on land was about to get a little more crowded.…
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PBS Eons: How the Andes Mountains Might Have Killed a Bunch of Whales
PBS Eons has a new episode and what happened to a bunch of whales. The Andes Mountains might have some explaining to do… At a site known as Cerro Ballena or Whale Hill, there are more than 40 skeletons of marine mammals — a graveyard of ocean life dating back 6.5 million to 9…
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PBS Eons: The Risky Paleo Diets of Our Ancestors
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the “paleo” diet of Homo erectus. We can track our history of eating just about anything back through the fossil record and see the impact it’s had on our evolution. Throughout time, part of the secret to our success as a species has been…
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PBS Eons: When a Billion Years Disappeared
PBS Eons has a new episode on the Great Unconformity, which is a massive gap in sedimentary rocks worldwide. This event might help to explain what brought about the evolution of biomineralization… think bones, teeth, shells, etc. In some places, the rocks below the Great Unconformity are about 1.2 billion years older than those…
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PBS Eons: How Dogs (Eventually) Became Our Best Friends
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about mans’ best friend… the dog! We’re still figuring out the details, but most scientists agree that it took thousands of years of interactions to develop our deep bond with dogs. When did they first become domesticated? Where did this happen? And what did the…
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PBS Eons: How the Egg Came First
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about eggs, the platypus, and of course birds! They tackle the endless question “What came first the Chicken or the egg?”. The story of the egg spans millions of years, from the first vertebrates that dared to venture onto land to today’s mammals, including…
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PBS Eons: When Penguins Went From The Sky To The Sea
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about penguins and how they evolved from sea birds. Today, we think of penguins as small-ish, waddling, tuxedo-birds. But they evolved from a flying ancestor, were actual giants for millions of years, and some of them were even dressed a little more casually.
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PBS Eons: When the Sahara Was Green
There’s a new PBS Eons episode. This one is about the “Green Sahara” only a few thousand years ago. The climate of the Sahara was completely different thousands of years ago. And we’re not talking about just a few years of extra rain. We’re talking about a climate that was so wet for so…
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PBS Eons: How a Hot Planet Created the World’s Biggest Snake
The new PBS Eons episode is about titanoboa and the world it lived in. Check it out! About 59 million years ago, the largest animal lurking in the ancient forests of Colombia by far was Titanoboa – the largest snake ever known. It’s only been in the past few years that we’ve put together…
