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.
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.
The Common Descent Podcast 