Listen to Episode 75 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast place!
The history of life on Earth is marked by tragedy. Life as we know it only exists because more ancient life lost the fight for survival. In this episode, we discuss the most mysterious – and possibly the most tragic – extinction event in Earth history, the most important transformation our planet has experienced since its formation: the Great Oxidation Event.
Listen to Episode 74 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or anywhere you find pocasts!
Today, it’s famous for the incredible diversity of the Andes Mountains and the Amazon rainforest, and its fossil record is full of unique ecosystems unlike any we see today, thanks to tens of millions of years of evolution in isolation; in this episode, we tackle South America.
Listen to Episode 73 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts!
As our friend Aly is fond of saying, plants aren’t just a colorful background to Earth history, they’re dynamic and influential drivers of environmental change. In this episode, she joins us to discuss one of the most famous and important innovations in all of plant evolution: Trees.
Listen to Episode 72 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or that other podcast place you like!
We’re no strangers to fascinating marine creatures on this podcast; we’ve tackled placoderms, whales, sharks, and mosasaurs. But weirder perhaps than all of those were a group of Mesozoic reptiles with large flippers, tiny tails, and heads that ranged from giant death traps to tiny noggins atop long necks. This episode, we dive into the Plesiosaurs.
Listen to Episode 71 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or that other podcast place you like!
Let’s take a trip back to the Cretaceous of North America, when the whole middle of the continent was flooded by an inland sea unlike anything in the world today. It split the continent in two and hosted a unique ecosystem now preserved across fossil sites from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. It was the Western Interior Seaway.
Listen to Episode 70 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts!
With all the diversity of life past and present, it’s incredible how often evolution repeats itself. Wings, flippers, eyes … all sorts of fascinating features have shown up multiple times in multiple groups of organisms. In this episode, we discuss this very common, curious, and sometimes confusing aspect of natural selection: Convergent Evolution.
Listen to Episode 69 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts!
Lots of animal groups have evolved bony armor, but one group of dinosaurs really took it to the extreme. The armored knobs, spikes, and weapons they wore all over their bodies have fascinated dino-fans for more than a century, and there are still so many questions unanswered. This episode, we look at Ankylosaurs.
Listen to Episode 68 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or your podcast source of choice!
Vision is so important in the lives of animals around the globe that it’s difficult to imagine a world without it. But sight has a long and mysterious evolutionary history, from simple light-sensitive cells to the complex organic cameras we humans have in our faces. In this episode, we discuss some of the most incredible innovations and unanswered questions in the Evolution of Eyes.
Listen to Episode 67 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or your podcast source of choice! And don’t forget the Bonus Episode: Voices of La Brea!
Join us as we explore one of the most famous fossil sites in the world. It’s not in a desert or on a mountain, but in the heart of one of the largest cities in North America. It’s also one of the best places on Earth to understand the changes in climate and ecology at the very end of the Ice Age. This episode, we take a trip to the La Brea Tar Pits.
Listen to Episode 66 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you’d like!
In this episode, we take a deep dive into the largest land mammals that have ever lived. We’ll explore the handful of modern species and their extraordinarily diverse evolutionary history. From mammoths to mastodons, shovel-tuskers to miniature island-dwellers, the fossil record is full of bizarre elephants.
Listen to Episode 65 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you’d like!
It’s Episode 65, and you know what that means … extinction! This time, we address what is traditionally considered one of the “Big 5,” but doesn’t seem to be “one” extinction at all. Geologists and paleontologists continue to work at piecing together the various causes and consequences that create an extended series – several millions years long – of very unfortunate events that altogether comprise the Late Devonian Extinction(s).
Listen to Episode 64 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite place for podcasts!
What would our science be without art? Fossils make for great photos, but a key part of paleontology is our ability to reconstruct long-dead organisms as living, functioning beings. In this episode, we’re joined by paleoartist and herpetologist Gabriel Ugueto as we discuss the many ways artists attempt to recreate ancient species through Paleoart.
The Common Descent Podcast 