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.
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.
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.
Listen to Episode 48 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!
In this episode we discuss sharks and their evolutionary history. Sharks are well know today as the top predators in many of the world’s ocean environments, but this wasn’t always the case. We’re covering the features that define a sharks and taking a look at some of the most interesting cases along the 400 million year story of shark evolution.
Listen to Episode 47 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your podcasts.
*Don’t forget to submit your questions for our End Of The Year Q&A!
In today’s world, there is only one group of synapsids: the mammals. But for a good 100 million years before true mammals appeared, a diverse array of non-mammalian synapsids dominated ecosystems on land. In this episode, we’re following the story of synapsid evolution from their earliest lizard-like ancestors right up to the origin of true mammals.
Listen to Episode 46 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or other podcast providers.
The world is full of strange and miraculous creatures, but some believe there are even stranger creatures yet to be discovered. Mysterious beasts have been in human stories since we started telling them, and even today, there are still tales of animals hidden from science. This is the focus of Cryptozoology.
The Common Descent Podcast 