Listen to Episode 41 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or your preferred podcast place!
This episode – the second most requested topic to date – deals with some of the largest and cleverest animals our planet has ever seen. We discuss how one group of mammals developed and moved from land to the sea as we explore the Evolution of Whales.
Listen to Episode 40 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or your preferred podcast place!
In this episode, we’re zooming in on one of the world’s most diverse and fascinating locales – the island of Madagascar! You may know that Madagascar is home to a variety of fascinating ecosystems today, but the geologic and fossil history of the island is just as exciting!
Listen to Episode 39 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast source!
Our subject for this episode is a bit more abstract than our typical topics. Here we discuss the subject of speculative evolution. This concept covers everything from imaging what the future of life will look like to figuring out how movie monsters might have actually functioned. Here we’ll visit some of the ideas that are commonly explored in these thought experiments and look at how speculation contributes to real science.
Listen to Episode 38 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast source!
In this episode, we are joined by our friend Aly Baumgartner, who tells us all about one of the world’s most successful – and influential – groups of plants, including how they’ve evolved, spread, and changed the world. Our very first plant-dedicated topic: Grass!
Listen to Episode 37 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast source!
This episode, our topic is one of the most detailed and exciting stories of evolutionary origin in the fossil record, one of the most historically fascinating questions in paleontology, and the single most requested topic from our listeners: The story of the Evolution of Birds.
Listen to Episode 36 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast source!
In this episode we dive into the concept of reefs. Reefs today are one of the most crucial environments in the oceans. They promote extremely high biodiversity and protect coast lines. Today we are accustomed to coral reefs, but throughout history many organisms have built reefs that proved just as important to ancient ocean life.
Listen to Episode 35 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast-place!
It’s time for another extinction episode!
Is extinction truly forever? In this episode, we discuss the stirrings of the real-life science seeking to bring back some semblance of the creatures of the past: De-extinction.
Listen to Episode 34 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or your personal preferred podcast platform!
Over the past three decades, a particular field of study has been revolutionizing our understanding of the past, driven by advances in technology and good ol’ scientific persistence. This episode, we discuss Ancient DNA.
Listen to Episode 33 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or a podcast provider near you!
In this episode we discuss the process through which organisms develop throughout their lives, otherwise known as ontogeny. We’ll examine what ontogeny is, what it teaches us, and how we deal with it in the fossil record.
Listen to Episode 32 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or that other place you get podcasts!
This episode, we dive in (not literally – we wish!) to the paleontology of Australia’s Naracoorte Caves, among the world’s best windows into the last several hundred thousand years of Australia’s history.
Listen to Episode 31 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or that other place you get podcasts!
Before the Cambrian Explosion, there was … a lot of weird squishy organisms. The Ediacaran, the subject of this episode, was a period just before the Cambrian. During this time we see the rise of a very odd and interesting group of organisms known as the Ediacaran Biota.
The Common Descent Podcast 