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.
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.
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.
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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