Listen to Episode 85 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever podcasts are sold!
We’ve talked about mass extinction many times, and indeed we’ve covered four out of the famous “Big Five” that so shaped the history of life on Earth. This time, we’re completing the set, discussing the earliest of the five, exploring the setting, causes, and results of the Ordovician Mass Extinction.
Listen to Episode 84 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast place!
Life ain’t easy. For animals, plants, and organisms of all kinds, there exists a constant threat of injury and disease. Fortunately, these unfortunate occurrences sometimes leave evidence in fossils that can inform us of the lives – and even deaths – of species from long ago. The study of this evidence is called Paleopathology.
Listen to Episode 83 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast place!
In 1938, a fishing crew pulled up a fish that everyone thought had been extinct for 70 million years. Since then, these fish have become famous not just for their strangely incomplete fossil record, but also for their unique anatomy and their close relationship to land vertebrates. In this episode, we discuss the strange and incredible story of Coelacanths.
Listen to Episode 82 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast place!
Throughout the Paleozoic Era, the oceans were home to an extraordinarily diverse and charismatic group of hard-bodied arthropods, successful enough in their time to have persisted for over 270 million years, and abundant enough in the fossil record to have become some of the most popular and recognizable fossils in the world. This episode, we talk Trilobites.
Listen to Episode 81 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or anywhere you’d like!
All animals change as they get older. Typically these changes are slow and subtle, but many animals famously undergo sudden and dramatic changes from young to adult – caterpillars to butterflies; fry to fish; or tadpoles to frogs. In this episode, we discuss the diversity and history of the incredible phenomenon called Metamorphosis.
Listen to Episode 80 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or that other podcast place you like!
Happy Darwin Day! In keeping with tradition, we’re joined by special guest Brittney Stoneburg this episode to discuss one of the most influential figures of early paleontology, a person who helped set the stage for the ways we uncover and understand ancient life today, and who was famously not famous in her own time. This episode, we’re discussing Mary Anning.
Listen to Episode 79 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts!
Around the same time that the first dinosaurs were walking around, another group of reptiles was doing something no vertebrates had ever done before: taking flight. For more than 150 million years, they ruled the skies, and we’ve spent the last 200 years or so learning ever more about just how bizarre and fascinating they were. This episode, we talk Pterosaurs.
Listen to Episode 78 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or anywhere podcasts can be found!
This episode is about the complex and surprising ways that evolution can change course under new pressures, and about how scientists argue over what to call this phenomenon! It starts as far back as Darwin, and continues in debates to this day. Let’s talk about Exaptation.
Listen to Episode 77 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or anywhere podcasts can be found!
Over 350 million years ago, vertebrate animals made one of the most dramatic evolutionary transitions in the history of life on Earth. A full-body anatomical makeover allowed one branch of the fish family tree to conquer the continents, setting the stage for a 300-million-year reign of vertebrates on land. In this episode, we discuss the Fish-Tetrapod Transition.
Listen to Episode 76 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or anywhere podcasts can be found!
The evolution of horses is not only one of the classic evolutionary stories of the ancient past, it’s also an incredible story of scientific discovery and adjustment. From the dawn of the Age of Mammals to the domestication of modern work animals, we’re taking a trip through Horse Evolution.
Listen to Episode 75 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast place!
The history of life on Earth is marked by tragedy. Life as we know it only exists because more ancient life lost the fight for survival. In this episode, we discuss the most mysterious – and possibly the most tragic – extinction event in Earth history, the most important transformation our planet has experienced since its formation: the Great Oxidation Event.
Listen to Episode 74 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or anywhere you find pocasts!
Today, it’s famous for the incredible diversity of the Andes Mountains and the Amazon rainforest, and its fossil record is full of unique ecosystems unlike any we see today, thanks to tens of millions of years of evolution in isolation; in this episode, we tackle South America.
The Common Descent Podcast 