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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).
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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.
Listen to Episode 63 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or that other podcast player you like!
Sex adds a whole other level of complexity to the lives of organisms. On top of the struggle to survive fueling natural selection, they must also compete to find a mate and reproduce. In this episode, we discuss one of the more bizarre mechanisms driving evolution: Sexual Selection.
Listen to Episode 62 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or that other podcast player you like!
For hundreds of millions of years, trees have produced resin. In the right conditions, that resin can harden and persist in the fossil record, and when we’re lucky, it can take with it all sorts of amazing organic remains that normally escape the fossil record: rare species, evidence of ecological interaction, and even behaviors caught in progress. This episode, we talk about the amazing world of Amber.
Listen to Episode 61 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or that other podcast player you like!
Ancient animals didn’t just stand around. They moved, interacted, hunted, reproduced, and did all the things animals do. It’s easy to image all of that information is lost to time, but there are all sorts of ways paleontologists can find those clues. In this episode, we’re exploring the tools, techniques, and amazing fossil finds that help us understand Behavior in the Fossil Record.
Listen to Episode 60 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or that other podcast player you like!
Turtles are so weird and wonderful. They’ve been around since the Triassic Period, but right from the start, they went down an anatomical pathway that has made them unlike any other animal. They took their strange body shape and diversified into an incredible array of shapes and lifestyles. And despite a fairly good fossil record and plenty of genetic data, their evolutionary relationships remain mysterious. This episode, it’s all about Turtles.
Listen to Episode 59 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or that other podcast player you like!
Only four times in the history of evolution have organisms developed powered flight. The only mammals to do it has achieved a worldwide distribution, a remarkable diversity, and the honor of being one of the most numerous groups of mammals. And yet, their evolutionary history is shrouded in mystery. In this episode, we discuss perhaps the most incredible of mammals: Bats.
Listen to Episode 58 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or that other podcast player you like!
For three decades at the end of the 1800s, two prominent paleontologists waged a war across North America. They discovered hundreds of fossil species from dozens of sites as they competed for the biggest discoveries and wrote lengthy criticisms of each other’s work. In the process, they laid the foundations of American paleontology and generated the nastiest and most infamous feud in the history of the field: the Bone Wars.
Listen to Episode 57 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast place!
In the modern world, flowering plants are dominant in nearly all ecosystems, but it wasn’t always this way. The fossil record of these plants doesn’t offer many clues to their origins, but once they arrived on the scene they underwent one of the biggest radiations in life history. In this episode, we’re joined again by our friend Aly Baumgartner to discuss the Evolution of Angiosperms.
Listen to Episode 56 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or anywhere they have podcasts!
In this episode we take a look at the origins of a theory that we discuss in almost every episode of the podcast: the theory of evolution. Instead of describing different examples of how evolution works we thought it better to describe the long and complicated history of how this idea came to exist as it does today. So join us as we analyze the Evolution of Evolutionary Theory.
Listen to Episode 55 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or anywhere they have podcasts!
Usually, when we talk about mass extinction, we’re referring to events long past. But scary levels of extinction are a fact of our current world, as well. In this episode, we discuss just how bad our current ecological crisis is, what’s causing it, what we can do about it, and whether or not the current state of affairs truly deserves to be called The Sixth Extinction.
The Common Descent Podcast 