Coil, a brown cartoon snake, and Bask, a green and beige cartoon croc, happily look toward the black on white Common Descent Podcast Title banner.

Author: commondescentpc

  • Episode 54 – Alfred Russell Wallace

    Episode 54 – Alfred Russell Wallace

    Listen to Episode 54 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or that other place you get podcasts … you know the one!

    Darwin Day has come around again (February 12th), and bio-nerds around the world are celebrating science and natural history! Last year, we devoted an episode to Charles Darwin himself, and this year we’re joined again by Dr. Sarah Bray of the podcast Discovering Darwin. But this time, we’re highlighting the other guy, the young naturalist who arrived at the same evolutionary hypothesis as Darwin, and who shared the spotlight of discovery for a while. This episode, we’re talking about the fascinating and often overlooked Alfred Russell Wallace.

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  • Episode 53 – The Baculum (Penis Bone)

    Listen to Episode 53 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or that other place you get podcasts … you know the one!

    It’s been called the most diverse of all bones. It comes in an incredible variety of shapes and sizes, living and fossil, scattered across the mammalian family tree. It is clearly of evolutionary importance, yet its exact function still perplexes scientists to this day. It’s called the baculum, and it is found exclusively in mammalian penises.

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  • Episode 52 – Sounds of the Past (Fossil Bioacoustics)

    Listen to Episode 52 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or anywhere they have podcasts!

    The sounds that animals make are a huge part of their behavior and how we recognize them. The sounds that prehistoric animals made, on the other hand, are lost to the past. But perhaps not entirely. There have been a few instances where fossils have given us clues to the noises these animals may have made, allowing paleontologists to reconstruct the Sounds of the Past.

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  • Episode 51 – Mosasaurs

    Listen to Episode 51 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or anywhere they have podcasts!

    The Mesozoic Era was home to many successful marine reptiles, but the best ones (that is to say, David’s favorites) were the carnivorous, fully-aquatic, extremely successful lizards of the sea: the Mosasaurs.

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  • Episode 50 – Australia

    Listen to Episode 50 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your podcasts.

    This episode, we’re exploring the largest “island” in the world. We’re discussing the long geologic history of how this landmass came to be the way it is now, and what fascinating ecosystems have come and gone along the way. Join us on a trip Down Under, to Australia.

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  • Episode 49 – Fake Fossils

    Listen to Episode 49 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your podcasts.

    And don’t forget to submit your question for our End Of The Year Q&A!

    Most of the time on this podcast, we’re geeking out over fossils from around the world. But in this episode, we’re venting a bit about the darker side of fossil-hunting: fraud. We’re discussing fake fossils: why they happen, how they happen, and what effect they have on paleontology.

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  • Episode 48 – Sharks

    Listen to Episode 48 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your podcasts.

    And don’t forget to submit your question for our End Of The Year Q&A!

    In this episode we discuss sharks and their evolutionary history. Sharks are well know today as the top predators in many of the world’s ocean environments, but this wasn’t always the case. We’re covering the features that define a sharks and taking a look at some of the most interesting cases along the 400 million year story of shark evolution.

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  • Episode 47 – Early Synapsids (“Proto-Mammals”)

    Listen to Episode 47 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your podcasts.

    *Don’t forget to submit your questions for our End Of The Year Q&A!

    In today’s world, there is only one group of synapsids: the mammals. But for a good 100 million years before true mammals appeared, a diverse array of non-mammalian synapsids dominated ecosystems on land. In this episode, we’re following the story of synapsid evolution from their earliest lizard-like ancestors right up to the origin of true mammals.

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  • Episode 46 – Cryptozoology

    Listen to Episode 46 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or other podcast providers.

    The world is full of strange and miraculous creatures, but some believe there are even stranger creatures yet to be discovered. Mysterious beasts have been in human stories since we started telling them, and even today, there are still tales of animals hidden from science. This is the focus of Cryptozoology.

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  • Episode 45 – The Permian Extinction

    Listen to Episode 45 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or other podcast providers.

    252 million years ago, there was an event so dramatic that it wiped out almost all life on the planet; so dramatic that it brought an end to the entire 300-million-year-long Paleozoic Era; so dramatic that it has come to be known as “The Great Dying.” In this episode, we discuss Earth history’s worst mass extinction: The Permian Extinction.

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  • SciFest in St. Louis

    Will and David took a trip to St. Louis for SciFest: Rock, Fossil, Quake on September 22nd!

    You can listen to us discuss the event and to our interviews with paleontologists on PodBean Spotify, YouTube, and other podcast places.

    The paleontologists we spoke with were:
    Dr. Ashley Morhardt, Washington University
    Dr. Andy Farke, Raymond Alf Museum
    Dr. Denver Fowler, Badlands Dinosaur Museum
    Dr. Casey Holliday, University of Missouri
    Dr. Liz Freedman Fowler, Dickinson State University
    Josh Matthews, Burpee Museum

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  • Episode 44 – Hybridization

    Listen to Episode 44 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or other podcast providers near you.

    In today’s episode we discuss the weird world of hybrids. The fact that different species of organisms sometimes breed has thrown a wrench into the scientific understanding of species and how they function for centuries. We won’t be solving that problem in this episode but we will cover how hybrids are made, why they’re made, how species stay separate, and what can happen when species (or other groups) interbreed.

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