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.

Category: Uncategorized

  • Episode 60 – Turtles

    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.

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  • Episode 59 – Bats

    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.

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  • Episode 58 – The Bone Wars

    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.

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  • Episode 57 – The Evolution of Flowering Plants (Angiosperms)

    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.

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  • Episode 56 – Evolution of Evolutionary Theory

    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.

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  • Episode 55 – The “Sixth Extinction” (Modern Biodiversity Crisis)

    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.

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  • 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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