You’ve heard of Family Feud… but how about Fossil Feud? Join us for a National Fossil Day livestream...

Trilobites are famous not just because they were so beautifully functional, or because they happened...

During the Cretaceous Period, dinosaurs were more diverse, more fierce, and more strange than ever....

There are animals in the fossil record that challenge some of our most basic ideas about what animal...

If you take it as a given that extinct dinosaurs were all weird and wonderful, then you gotta at lea...

We know a lot about dinosaurs but there’s one question that has plagued paleontologists for decades:...

Smilodon was a fearsome Ice Age cat, the size of a modern-day tiger, that had a pair of fangs nearly...

What if we told you that there was a time when oxygen almost wiped out all life on Earth? 3 billion...

Today, we’re familiar with two types of flying vertebrates -- birds and bats. But over 66 million ye...

With its lizard-like appearance and that distinctive sail on it back, Dimetrodon is practically the...

Natural history is full of living things that were long thought to have gone extinct only to show up...

There are many fossils that challenge our ability to form even the most basic idea of how a living t...

Insects outnumber humans by a lot and we only like to think we're in charge because we're bigger tha...

Fossil fuels are made from the remains of extinct organisms that have been exposed to millions of ye...

Part of why we’re so fascinated with extinct dinosaurs it’s just hard for us to believe that animals...

Besides the blue of the oceans, the dominant color of our planet, as we know it, is green. But imagi...

Crocodiles, horseshoe crabs and tuatara are animals that have persisted for millions of years, said...

We know whales as graceful giants bound to the sea. But what if we told you there was actually a tim...

Our image of dinosaurs has been constantly changing since naturalists started studying them about 35...

By looking at the layers beneath our feet, geologists have been able to identify and describe crucia...

More than 4 billion years ago, the crust of the Earth was still cooling and the oceans were only beg...

Over the past 20 years, dinosaurs of all types and sizes have been found with some sort of fluff or...

Imagine an enormous, lush rainforest teeming with life...in the Arctic. Well there was a time -- and...

Probably twice the size of a modern gorilla, Gigantopithecus is the greatest great-ape that ever was...

420 million years ago, a giant feasted on the dead, growing slowly into the largest living thing on...

What if I told you that, more than two billion years ago, some tiny living thing started to live ins...

About 5 million years ago, a new predator made its way from the south and onto the coastal plains of...

In the late 1800s, paleontologists in Nebraska found huge coils of hardened sand stuck deep in the e...

90 million years ago, an ancient snake known as Najash had...legs. It is by no means the only snake...

The study of natural history is the study of how the world has changed but Earth itself is in a cons...

The first era of our current eon, the Paleozoic Era, is probably the most deceptively fascinating ti...

We don’t know which living thing was the very first to arrive at the totally revolutionary process t...

Fossils found around the world suggest that multi-cellular life was not only present before the Camb...

Where did turtles come from? And how did the they get their shells? The answers to these questions w...

We traveled to Bozeman, Montana to meet with Dr. Ellen-Thérèse Lamm who explores ancient life by stu...

For decades, one of the most abundant kinds of fossils on Earth, numbering in the millions of specim...

We're back in Bozeman, Montana this week talking to Amy Atwater, Collections Manager at the Museum o...

The search for our origins go back to a single common ancestor -- one that remains shrouded in myste...

The ancestors of modern, squishy cephalopods like the octopus and the squid all had shells. In ancie...

Two extinct relatives of horses and rhinos are closely related to each other but have strikingly dif...

Reptiles emerged from the Paleozoic as humble creatures, but in time, they grew to become some of th...

In 1912, a fossil collector discovered some strange bone fragments in the eerie, beautiful Cretaceou...

After taking you on a journey through geologic time, we've arrived at the Cenozoic Era. Most of the...

At the beginning of the Triassic Period, with the continents locked together from pole-to-pole in th...

The Triassic was full of creatures that look a lot like other, more modern species, even though they...

There are fossils of viruses, of sorts, preserved in the DNA of the hosts that they’ve infected. Inc...

385 million years ago, a group of fish would undertake one of the most important journeys in the his...

Tyrannosaurus rex was big, Tyrannosaurus rex was vicious, and Tyrannosaurus rex had tiny arms. The s...

Over the first season of PBS Eons, we’ve explored the history of Earth from the very origins of life...

Insects were the first animals to ever develop the ability to fly, and, arguably, they did it the be...

In 1800s, miners began working in exposed deposits of mud near the town of Messel, Germany. They wer...

420 million years ago, some fish were more medieval. They wore armor, sometimes made of big plates,...

Experts are still arguing over whether Archaeopteryx was a true bird, or a paravian dinosaur, or som...

The ancestors of modern horses became so successful that they spread all over the world, to Europe,...

One of the most dynamic, transformative, and potentially dangerous features in North America is also...

A huge and diverse subfamily of dogs, the bone-crushers patrolled North America for more than thirty...

This is not a Game of Thrones fan fiction episode. Dire wolves were real! And thousands of them died...

Fossilized footprints have proved that human ancestors were already striding across the landscape 3....

Paleontologists have been studying and drawing totally different conclusions about the fossil LH PV1...

In 1993, scientists cracked open a piece of amber, took out the body of an ancient weevil, and sampl...

Temnospondyls were a huge group of amphibians that existed for 210 million years. And calling them ‘...

Purgatorius, a kind of mammal called a plesiadapiform, might’ve been one of your earliest ancestors....

Due to an odd quirk of genetics and some unique evolutionary circumstances, two humans who lived at...

The best evidence we have suggests that, while Caviomorpha originated in South America, they came fr...

Ratites have spread to Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and South America. And there are fossils of R...

Camels are famous for adaptations that have allowed them to flourish where most other large mammals...

The story of sloths is one of astounding ecological variability, with some foraging in the seas, oth...

If you’ve ever been to, or lived in, or even flown over the central swath of North America, then you...

Today, our closest evolutionary relatives, the apes, live only in small pockets of Africa and Asia....

For more than 10 million years, Megalodon was at the top of its game as the oceans’ apex predator......

Not too long ago, our early human ancestors were under constant threat of attack from predators. And...

Blood is one of the most revolutionary features in our evolutionary history. Over hundreds of millio...

As more and more fossil ancestors have been found, our genus has become more and more inclusive, inc...

The mammoths fossils found on the Channel Islands off the coast of southern California are much smal...

In order to understand where hearts came from, we have to go back to the earliest common ancestor of...

Strange geologic landmarks in the Pacific Northwest are the lingering remains of a mystery that took...

Back in the late Miocene epoch, there was an island--or maybe a group of islands-- in the Mediterran...

The California condor is the biggest flying bird in North America, a title that it has held since th...

The tools made by our human ancestors may not seem like much when you compare them to the screen you...

Sea scorpions thrived for 200 million years, coming in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Over time...

The ability to make and use fire has fundamentally changed the arc of our evolution. The bodies we h...

The short-faced bears turned out to be remarkably adaptable, undergoing radical changes to meet the...

In the Eocene Epoch, there was a reptile that had teeth equipped for biting through flesh, its hind...

From our deepest origins in Africa all the way to the Americas, by looking at the fossils and archae...

All of today’s big cat species evolved less than 11 million years ago and yet their evolutionary his...

Throughout the Pleistocene Epoch, the range of the woolly rhino grew and shrank in sync with global...

Despite the name, we don’t know where the so-called “hell pigs” belong in the mammalian family tree....

As a scientific concept, evolution was revolutionary when it was first introduced. With the help of...

Synapsids were the world’s first-ever terrestrial megafauna but the vast majority of these giants we...

The marine reptiles Ichthyosaurs arose after The Great Dying, which wiped out at least 90 percent of...

We all belong to the only group of hominins on the planet today. But we weren’t always alone. 100,00...

Over 600 million years ago, sheets of ice coated our planet on both land and sea. How did this happe...

They have survived every catastrophe and every mass extinction event that nature has thrown at them....

Megaloceros was one of the largest members of the deer family ever to walk the Earth. The archaeolog...

Paleontologists have spent the better part of two decades debating whether Coelophysis ate its own k...

The myth of the Missing Link--the idea that there must be a specimen that partly resembles an ape bu...

In 1964, a paleontologist named John Ostrom unearthed some fascinating fossils from the mudstone of...

Bats pretty much appear in the fossil record as recognizable, full-on, flying bats. And they show up...

When pterosaurs first took flight, you could say that it marked the beginning of the end for the win...

Just a few thousand years ago, the island of Madagascar was inhabited by giant lemurs. How did such...

Before the start of the Eocene Epoch about 56 million years ago--Antarctica was still joined to both...

Paleontologists found a small theropod dinosaur skull right on top of a nest of eggs that were belie...

Its discoverers named it Homo floresiensis, but it’s often called “the hobbit” for its short stature...

People have been discovering the traces and remains of prehistoric creatures for thousands of years....

A 9,500 year old burial in Cyprus represents some of the oldest known evidence of human/cat companio...

These hyaenodonts gave the world some of its largest terrestrial, carnivorous mammals ever known. An...

Woolly mammoths, our favorite ice age proboscidean, disappeared from Europe and North America at the...

Because of their strange combination of bear-like and dog-like traits, they’re sometimes confusingly...

How does a bear -- which is a member of the order Carnivora -- evolve into an herbivore? Despite how...

How could a body of water as big as the Mediterranean just...disappear? It would take decades and mo...

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Neandertals were thought to have been…primitive. Unin...

From end to end, its forelimbs alone measured an incredible 2.4 meters long and were tipped with big...

Throughout the Cenozoic Era -- the era we’re in now -- marsupials and their metatherian relatives fl...

Long necks gave sauropods a huge advantage when it came to food, but not in the way you think. And t...

The Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse set the stage for a takeover that would be a crucial turning p...

About 59 million years ago, the largest animal lurking in the ancient forests of Colombia by far was...

The climate of the Sahara was completely different thousands of years ago. And we’re not talking abo...

Today, we think of penguins as small-ish, waddling, tuxedo-birds. But they evolved from a flying anc...

The story of the egg spans millions of years, from the first vertebrates that dared to venture onto...

We’re still figuring out the details, but most scientists agree that it took thousands of years of i...

In some places, the rocks below the Great Unconformity are about 1.2 billion years older than those...

We can track our history of eating just about anything back through the fossil record and see the im...

At a site known as Cerro Ballena or Whale Hill, there are more than 40 skeletons of marine mammals -...

In the middle of the Cambrian, life on land was about to get a little more crowded. And those newcom...

There’s one kind of herpesvirus that’s specific to one species of primate, and each virus split off...

Scientists had no idea what type of organisms the life forms of the Ediacaran were—lichen, colonies...

There were a huge number of croc-like animals that flourished during the Triassic Period. Dinosaurs...

There was a time in Earth’s history that was so stable, geologists once called it the Boring Billion...

All told, the Arctic in the Cretaceous Period was a rough place to live, especially in winter. And y...

The rise and fall of ancient walruses, and how modern ones got their tusks, is a story that spans al...

To try to solve the puzzle of Lark Quarry, experts have turned to a special subfield of paleontology...

Untangling the origins of Beelzebufo -- the giant frog that lived alongside the dinosaurs -- turns o...

Paleontologists have been studying these dinosaurs since the 1830s, but nobody had ever found a spec...

Thanks to a recent adaptation, instead of getting sick from the boozy, fermented fruits, one of our...

To figure out how Thrinaxodon and Broomistega became entombed together, scientists looked at the bur...

Beneath layers of rock art are drawings of animals SO strange that, for a long time, some anthropolo...

In 1977, a farmer was plowing his field on a plateau high in the Andes mountains when he stumbled up...

These odd rodents belong to a genus known as Ceratogaulus, but they’re more commonly called horned g...

Early primates not only lived in North America -- our primate family tree actually originated here!...

How and why does botanical carnivory keep evolving? It turns out that when any of the basic things t...

While clubs are practically synonymous with ankylosaurs, we’ve only started to get to the bottom of...

For some reason, animals keep evolving into things that look like crabs, independently, over and ove...

At more than 2 meters long, Aegirocassis was not only the biggest radiodont ever, but it also may ha...

It arose from rhino ancestors that were a lot smaller, but Paraceratherium would take a different ev...

We’re the only primate without a coat of thick fur. It turns out that this small change in our appea...

Lizards are incredibly widespread and diverse but it took them a long time to get to where they are...

For decades, scientists have been studying the cause of the Younger Dryas, and trying to figure out...

Figuring out what this creature’s face actually looked like would take paleontologists years. But un...

It’s important to us that you understand how big this beaver was. Just like modern beavers, it was s...

This ancient species had the same six legs and segmented body that we’d recognize from an ant today....

Our DNA holds evidence of a huge, ancient pandemic, one that touched many different species, spanned...

The evolution of our ability to speak is its own epic saga and it’s worth pausing to appreciate that...

The biggest turtle ever described wasn’t an ancestor of today’s leatherback turtles or any other liv...

Our DNA holds thousands of dead genes and we’ve only just begun to unravel their stories. But one th...

It's possible Euchambersia possessed venom about 20 million years before the first lizards and over...

Elongated tubes, flat ribbons, and other “worm-like” body plans were so varied and abundant that a p...

No other placental mammal that we know of prefers one side of the body so consistently, not even our...

Today, chilis are the most widely cultivated spice crop in the world - grown everywhere from their n...

Nunalleq, a village in what’s today southwest Alaska, seemed to have thrived during the Little Ice A...

While dinosaurs were dominating the land, the metriorhynchids were thriving in the seas. But taking...

420 million years ago, the forest floor of what's now New York was covered with a plant that didn’t...

Weasels have an extreme body plan that may push the boundaries of what’s metabolically possible. So...

It might surprise you but cephalopods have a pretty good fossil record, with one major exception. If...

At Tanque Loma, at least 22 giant ground sloths in the genus Eremotherium met their end. Of the five...

Lots of the traits we think of as defining us as mammals show up pretty early, during the time of th...

The Wrangel Island mammoths would end up being the final survivors of a once-widespread genus. In th...

The remains of medium-sized predatory dinosaurs are pretty rare in places where giant predators like...

The story of how the starfish got its arms reminds us that even animals that might be familiar to us...

Toxodon was one of the last members of a lineage that vanished 11,000 years ago after thriving in is...

The world of the Jurassic was a lot like ours - similar interactions between plants and insects were...

The Toba supervolcano was the biggest explosive eruption of the last 2.5 million years. And humans w...

The Amazon rainforest of South America is a paradise for flowering plants. But long ago, the landsca...

For decades, scientists believed dinosaurs were diurnal and tiny mammals were nocturnal. But as rese...

It looks like the evolution of ocean-going whales like Borealodon may have affected communities foun...

Dinosaur mating behavior has been the subject of a lot of speculation, but what can we actually say...

Plants first made their way onto land at least 470 million years ago but for their first 80 million...

These relatives of ours lived in Eurasia for more than 300,000 years. They were expert toolmakers, u...

The hardened residue scraped off your teeth at the dentist is called your dental calculus, and your...

If you know one thing about pterosaurs, it’s that they’re flyers. And while pterosaurs may be well-k...

Around 10,000 years ago, somewhere in Africa, a microscopic parasite made a huge leap. With a little...

The Snake Detection Hypothesis proposes that the ability to quickly spot and avoid snakes is deeply...

We often think of dinosaurs as either preying on other dinos or mammals, or as plant-eaters -- but i...

As revolutionary as teeth were, they would go on to disappear in some groups of vertebrates. But why...

Do our modern horses descend from just one domesticated population, or did it happen many times, in...

Today, all mammals from humans to bats have five fingers or fewer. Yes, even whales, whose finger bo...

There used to be SO MANY sharks...where did they go?

Dire wolves aren’t actually wolves but what they are might be even cooler.

Could humans survive during the Precambrian?

Don’t be fooled by convergent evolution.

Why do human knees suck?

And it’s been reported that one of the geologists started it on purpose?

The ecological niche of apex predators was empty on Hateg Island, waiting to be occupied by somethin...

Would you have survived the K-Pg Impact?

A truly enormous ichthyosaur around the size of a modern sperm whale, reached its size within just a...

Thylacines are definitely extinct!

Hyenas weren’t always able to eat bones. In fact, only a few million years ago, they lived very diff...

The bird that evolved twice!

I will pass on the parasitic mind-controlling mushroom, thanks

We tend to think that evolution only goes in one direction— toward getting bigger and more advanced....

While sour taste's original purpose was to warn vertebrates of danger, in a few animal groups, inclu...

Only a handful of Denisovan fossils have been identified. In the absence of actual body fossils, it’...

While we’ve been farming for around 10,000 to 12,000 years, the ancestors of ants have been doing it...

A mysterious, large feline roamed Eurasia during the last ice age. Its fossils have been found acros...

Fossil evidence suggests Diictodon used burrows to breed, and that a parent stayed behind to feed an...

There’s something weird going on at the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry in what’s now Utah.

Does Homo erectus beat out Homo sapiens?

Sometimes modern problems require ancient, evolutionary solutions.

What was this ancient pup’s last meal?

The newest oldest saber-toothed mammal

In the quest to understand how evolution basically built the woolly mammoth, we may have found the b...

Paleodictyon, a hexagonal-patterned fossil, is a bit of a mystery. We don’t even know if it’s a trac...

In 2003, microbiologists made a huge discovery. One that would force us to reconsider a lot of what...

Microbiology goes macro with a new giant bacterium!

Spinosaurus had dense bones!

Guemesia: a new no-arm dino

This giant millipede was the largest known invertebrate to ever live on land. So how did it get so b...

Despite the profound changes we’ve made here in recent history, the epic saga of Los Angeles' natura...

Today, billions of people around the world start their day with caffeine. But how and why did the ab...

One of the biggest earthquakes humans ever experienced happened around 3800 years ago in what's now...

We have no idea where they were all this time, or who stole and returned them and why.

Flesh-eating bees exist!

Archaeologists have discovered an ancient art workshop

There is one - and only one - group of mammals that doesn’t have alpha-gal: the catarrhine primates,...

Mystacodon is the earliest known mysticete, the group that, today, we call the baleen whales. But if...

This fungus was actually manipulating ants’ movements, forcing them to do something they’d never ord...

Did you know that fossils can get sick? – Specifically with Pyrite Disease

Disaster in the great plains!

80 years ago, a bunch of fossils of ancient humans disappeared.

Congrats! You just found a wombat burrow. And the cubes are its poop.

Wisdom teeth can be such a pain

Paranthropus got chomped by a leopard

We didn’t always wear clothes!

Ancient sperm whale heads belonged on every shark-cuterie board

Mercury, Venus, and Mars are all super low on water – so where did ours come from and why do we have...

Around the time that some of our fishapod relatives were crawling out of the water, others were tur...

We might’ve been wrong about how this saber-toothed cat looked

Sometimes evolution is completely predictable.

Shanidar 1 got by with a little help from his friends

Here are two ways to get a fossil species named after you.