Listen to Episode 117 on PodBean, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever else you can find it!
Several thousand living species – and many more fossils – are called “crabs,” but they don’t all share an evolutionary history. The crab-like body plan is a repeated trend in crustacean evolution, and there are differing opinions on what exactly counts as a “crab” and why natural selection keeps making them. This episode, we talk Crabs and Carcinization.
Listen to Episode 116 on PodBean, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever else you can find it!
Of all the reptiles to evolve marine lifestyles, only one were so strikingly specialized to earn the name “fish reptiles.” This episode, we discuss the long evolutionary history, extraordinary adaptations, diverse lifestyles, and perplexing extinction of Ichthyosaurs.
Listen to Episode 104 on PodBean, YouTube, Spotify, or your favorite alternative!
Seals, sea lions, and walruses (oh my!) are widespread, successful, and invariably charming. In this episode, we examine the adaptations, mysterious origins, and diverse but spotty fossil record of this fascinating group of aquatic mammals, the Pinnipeds.
Listen to Episode 89 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite place to find podcasts!
More than 100 years ago, explorers in the Canadian Rocky Mountains came across some exceptional fossils. Nowadays, that locality is famous as one of the most important fossil sites in the world for understanding animal evolution, Earth history, and fossil preservation. This episode, we talk about the incredible Burgess Shale.
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 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 72 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or that other podcast place you like!
We’re no strangers to fascinating marine creatures on this podcast; we’ve tackled placoderms, whales, sharks, and mosasaurs. But weirder perhaps than all of those were a group of Mesozoic reptiles with large flippers, tiny tails, and heads that ranged from giant death traps to tiny noggins atop long necks. This episode, we dive into the Plesiosaurs.
Listen to Episode 71 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or that other podcast place you like!
Let’s take a trip back to the Cretaceous of North America, when the whole middle of the continent was flooded by an inland sea unlike anything in the world today. It split the continent in two and hosted a unique ecosystem now preserved across fossil sites from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. It was the Western Interior Seaway.
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 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.
The Common Descent Podcast 