Tag: PBS Eons
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PBS Eons: How South America Made the Marsupials
PBS Eons has a new video. This one is about the marsupials of South America. Throughout the Cenozoic Era — the era we’re in now — marsupials and their metatherian relatives flourished all over South America, filling all kinds of ecological niches and radiating into forms that still thrive on other continents.
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PBS Eons: The Giant Dinosaur That Was Missing a Body
PBS Eons has a new video. This one is about Deinonychus, whose name means horrible hand. From end to end, its forelimbs alone measured an incredible 2.4 meters long and were tipped with big, comma-shaped claws. But other than its bizarre arms, very little material from this dinosaur had been found: no skull, no…
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PBS Eons: The Neanderthals That Taught Us About Humanity
Checkout the new episode of PBS Eons. It’s about Neanderthals and how they weren’t much different than us. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Neandertals were thought to have been…primitive. Unintelligent, hunched-over cavemen, for lack of a better word. But the discoveries made in that Iraqi cave provided some of the earliest…
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PBS Eons: That Time the Mediterranean Sea Disappeared
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one combines paleontology and geology to discuss the history of the Mediterranean Sea. How could a body of water as big as the Mediterranean just…disappear? It would take decades and more than 1,000 research studies to even start to figure out the cause — or causes —…
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PBS Eons: Life, Sex & Death Among the Dire Wolves
There’s a new episode of PBS’s Eons. It’s about wolves and the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. This is not a Game of Thrones fan fiction episode. Dire wolves were real! And thousands of them died in the same spot in California. Their remains have taught us volumes about how they lived,…
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PBS Eons: The Forgotten Story of the Beardogs
PBS Eons has a new eposide and it’s about Beardogs, otherwise known as Amphicyonids. Because of their strange combination of bear-like and dog-like traits, they’re sometimes confusingly called the beardogs. And even though you’ve never met one of these animals, the beardogs are key to understanding the history of an important branch of the…
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PBS Eons: Why Male Mammoths Lost the Game
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about male mammoths and their dangerous and mostly solitary existence. Woolly mammoths, our favorite ice age proboscidean, disappeared from Europe and North America at the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. Today, we’ve teamed up with TierZoo to solve one…
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PBS Eons: When Giant Hypercarnivores Prowled Africa
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about the giant carnivores of Africa. These hyaenodonts gave the world some of its largest terrestrial, carnivorous mammals ever known. And while these behemoths were the apex predators of their time, they were no match for a changing world.
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PBS Eons: How We Domesticated Cats (Twice)
PBS Eons has a new episode and it’s a great one for cat lovers! It seems that cats have been domesticated twice and this is the story of Felis silvestris lybica. A 9,500 year old burial in Cyprus represents some of the oldest known evidence of human/cat companionships anywhere in the world. But when…
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PBS Eons: Were These Monsters Inspired by Fossils?
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about monsters, more specifically the Cyclops. People have been discovering the traces and remains of prehistoric creatures for thousands of years. And they’ve also probably been telling stories about fantastic beasts since language became a thing. So, is it possible that the monsters that populate our…
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PBS Eons: When Hobbits Were Real
A new episode of PBS Eons is out. And, this one is about Homo floresiensis, otherwise known as the “hobbit”. Its discoverers named it Homo floresiensis, but it’s often called “the hobbit” for its short stature and oddly proportioned feet. And it’s been at the center of a major controversy in the field ever…
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PBS Eons: The Case of the Dinosaur Egg Thief
There’s a new PBS Eons episode. This one’s about Oviraptor. The would be “Egg Thief” is now a caring mother… Paleontologists found a small theropod dinosaur skull right on top of a nest of eggs that were believed to belong to a plant-eating dinosaur. Instead of being the nest robbers that they were originally…
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PBS Eons: When Antarctica Was Green
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one discusses when Antarctica was green and had a population of animals. Before the start of the Eocene Epoch about 56 million years ago–Antarctica was still joined to both Australia and South America. And it turns out that a lot of what we recognize about the southern hemisphere…
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PBS Eons: When Giant Lemurs Ruled Madagascar
PBS Eons has a new episode. It is about the history of lemurs on Madagascar. How did they get there? In what ways did they evolve? What happened to the giants? Just a few thousand years ago, the island of Madagascar was inhabited by giant lemurs. How did such a diverse group of primates…
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PBS Eons: How Pterosaurs Got Their Wings
PBS Eons has another episode. This one is about the origins of pterosaurs. Although the evidence is pretty sparse, we aren’t sure of their ancestors. Scleromochlus, or something like it, is a likely candidate. Watch the episode for more details… When pterosaurs first took flight, you could say that it marked the beginning of…
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PBS Eons: When Bats Took Flight
PBS Eons has a new episode about bats. Bats are very rare in the fossil record and thus we still have much to learn about their evolutionary history. What came first flight or echo-location? Bats pretty much appear in the fossil record as recognizable, full-on, flying bats. And they show up on all of…
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PBS Eons: The Raptor That Made Us Rethink Dinosaurs
PBS Eons has a new episode about Deinonychus and that endless question… Were dinosaurs warm or cold blooded? In 1964, a paleontologist named John Ostrom unearthed some fascinating fossils from the mudstone of Montana. Its discovery set the stage for what’s known today as the Dinosaur Renaissance, a total re-thinking of what we thought…
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PBS Eons: The Missing Link That Wasn’t
A new episode of PBS Eons is out. It is about the Piltdown Man and how our understanding of Evolution has changed since. The myth of the Missing Link–the idea that there must be a specimen that partly resembles an ape but also partly resembles a modern human–is persistent. But the reality is that…
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PBS Eons: Was This Dinosaur a Cannibal?
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the Ceolophysis finds at the Ghost Ranch an the implications for dinosaur behavior. Paleontologists have spent the better part of two decades debating whether Coelophysis ate its own kind. It turns out, the evidence that scientists have had to study in order to answer…
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PBS Eons: When Giant Deer Roamed Eurasia
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the Irish Elk of more correctly, Megaloceros. Megaloceros was one of the largest members of the deer family ever to walk the Earth. The archaeological record is full of evidence that our ancestors lived alongside and interacted with these giant mammals for millennia. But…
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PBS Eons: How Earth’s First, Unkillable Animals Saved the World
PBS Eons has another new episode. This time they discuss sponges and how they saved the world to allow more complex life to evolve. They have survived every catastrophe and every mass extinction event that nature has thrown at them. And by being the little, filter-feeding, water-cleaning creatures that they are, sponges may have…
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PBS Eons: How Volcanoes Froze the Earth (Twice)
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about Snowball Earth, which is the theory that the whole earth was covered by ice. This happened at least twice in the last 700 million years. Over 600 million years ago, sheets of ice coated our planet on both land and sea. How did this…
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PBS Eons: When Ichthyosaurs Led a Revolution in the Seas
PBS Eons has a video about the rise of the Ichthyosaurs after the “Great Dying” at the end of the Permian. PBS Eons is a great, educational series from PBS on Youtube, with a new episode each week. The marine reptiles Ichthyosaurs arose after The Great Dying, which wiped out at least 90 percent…
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PBS Eons: When the Synapsids Struck Back
PBS Eons has a great video about the ancestors and evolution of the mammals and the Permian Mass Extincton. Synapsids were the world’s first-ever terrestrial megafauna but the vast majority of these giants were doomed to extinction. However some lived on, keeping a low profile among the dinosaurs. And now our world is the…
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PBS Eons: The History of Climate Cycles (and the Woolly Rhino) Explained
PBS Eons has a great video about climate cycles and what caused ebb and flow of the ice ages. Milankovitch cycles are front and center, with good explanation of how we are affecting the climate today. Throughout the Pleistocene Epoch, the range of the woolly rhino grew and shrank in sync with global climate.…
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PBS Eons: The Croc That Ran on Hooves
PBS Eons has an episode about an interesting crocodile. In the Eocene Epoch, there was a reptile that had teeth equipped for biting through flesh, its hind legs were a lot longer than its front legs and instead of claws, its toes were each capped with hooves. How did this living nightmare come to…
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PBS Eons: When Giant Scorpions Swarmed the Seas
PBS Eons has an awesome video about Sea Scorpions. Sea scorpions thrived for 200 million years, coming in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Over time, they developed a number of adaptations–from crushing claws to flattened tails for swimming. And some of them adapted by getting so big that they still hold the…
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PBS Eons: Why Megalodon (Definitely) Went Extinct
Check out the new episode of PBS Eons over on YouTube. It’s about Megalodon and why it really is extinct. Don’t believe what you see during Shark Week! For more than 10 million years, Megalodon was at the top of its game as the oceans’ apex predator…until 2.6 million years ago, when it went…
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PBS Eons: Did Raptorex Really Exist?
PBS Eons has a new video… Did Raptorex Really Exist? It discusses the controversy over when, where, and did Raptorex live.
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PBS Eons: How a Supervolcano Made the Cenozoic’s Coolest Fossils
PBS's Eons Channel on YouTube has an episode about the supervolcano under Yellowstone. Twelve million years ago saw the creation of Ashfall Fossil Beds in Nebraska. Truly, a bad day in the Miocene!
