Listen to Episode 165 on PodBean, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts!
Faced with the problem of dispersing seeds, flowering plants developed special seed-carrying structures that are perhaps most familiar to you from your visits to the grocery store. This episode, we discuss the evolution, functions, and incredible diversity of Fruit.
Listen to Episode 154 on PodBean, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts!
Not all embryos develop inside eggs. In many animals, embryos develop fully inside the parent’s body. This habit has evolved numerous times and in numerous styles. This episode, we discuss the complex and fascinating evolution of Live Birth.
Listen to Episode 135 on PodBean, YouTube, Spotify, or any other way you’d like!
Every plant starts somewhere, and often that somewhere is a small, secure, sturdy container capable of protecting, nourishing, and carrying a plant embryo until it’s time to sprout. This episode, we discuss the biology, evolution, and incredible paleontological importance of Seeds.
Listen to Episode 92 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or just search for it in your podcast app!
Animals are many and varied, but one of the things nearly all of them share is that they start life off inside a small and special capsule complete with everything the growing embryo needs for protection and nutrition. In this episode, we discuss the diversity, evolution, and fossil history of Eggs.
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 63 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or that other podcast player you like!
Sex adds a whole other level of complexity to the lives of organisms. On top of the struggle to survive fueling natural selection, they must also compete to find a mate and reproduce. In this episode, we discuss one of the more bizarre mechanisms driving evolution: Sexual Selection.
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 44 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or other podcast providers near you.
In today’s episode we discuss the weird world of hybrids. The fact that different species of organisms sometimes breed has thrown a wrench into the scientific understanding of species and how they function for centuries. We won’t be solving that problem in this episode but we will cover how hybrids are made, why they’re made, how species stay separate, and what can happen when species (or other groups) interbreed.
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.
The Common Descent Podcast 