Eons

Science and Nature Series / 7 Seasons

Join hosts Michelle Barboza-Ramirez, Kallie Moore, and Blake de Pastino as they take you on a journey through the history of life on Earth. From the dawn of life in the Archaean Eon through the Mesozoic Era — the so-called “Age of Dinosaurs” -- right up to the end of the most recent Ice Age.

6m 46s

Why The Giraffe Got Its Neck

S6 E1 / 9m 1s

How and why the giraffe's neck emerged in the first place has been a mystery that generations of biologists have argued over – one that has made us reconsider our understanding of how evolution actually works over and over again.

We Helped Make Mosquitoes A Problem

S6 E2 / 8m 10s

Around 6,000 years ago, in the Sahel region of Africa, a lone female mosquito buzzed through the lush, green savannah. She couldn’t know it, but the planet itself was about to change in ways that would see her descendants evolve to live very different lives. A sudden ecological shift would force them to go from living in forests and feeding on a range of animals to specializing on just one single

Did a Tsunami Swallow Part of Europe?

S6 E3 / 8m 3s

What happened to the piece of prime prehistoric real estate known as Doggerland? While a massive megatsunami might have drowned it for good, the underlying reason that it now lies under the sea may have actually been the same thing that made it so great in the first place.

That Time The Ocean Lost (Almost) All Its Oxygen

S6 E4 / 9m 31s

This is the story of how our planet rescued itself from extreme conditions in the Cretaceous Period, at the cost of essentially suffocating the oceans for half-a-million years.

You're Living On An Ant Planet

S6 E5 / 9m 14s

How did ants take over the world? Well, it looks like they didn’t achieve world domination all by themselves. They may have just been riding the wave of a totally different evolutionary explosion.

Do Thunderbeasts Prove Giant Animals Are Inevitable?

S6 E6 / 7m 50s

The journey the thunder beasts took to reach such mega proportions from such humble beginnings forces us to ask an important question, one that paleontologists have been asking for more than a century: from an evolutionary perspective, is bigger always better?

When Did We Stop Being Naked?

S6 E7 / 9m 5s

Of course, the ancient Egyptians were probably not the first people to ever wear clothing, but we haven’t found any clothes older than the Tarkhan Dress. So how can we figure out when we first started wearing clothes? Well, it turns out that some of our best evidence for clothing in the past comes from a pretty unlikely - and kinda gross - place.

The Huge Extinctions We Are Just Now Discovering

S6 E8 / 8m 58s

What graptolites tell us is a story of incredible changes in the ocean, of periods where the oceans became poisonous and suffocating before eventually clearing up again. They unlock extinctions and recoveries that scientists didn't see. And, most of all, they show us how unpredictable the Silurian period really could be.

Beans & Bees (Not Bats) Gave Us Butterflies

S6 E9 / 7m 9s

For a few years we thought bats were to thank for the existence of butterflies. The idea was that the evolution of bats drove one group of moths to abandon the night entirely, becoming active during the day to escape, giving rise to butterflies. But it turns out the groups we should actually be thanking for the beautiful bugs are bees and beans.

Why Only Earth Has Fire

S6 E10 / 10m 45s

Earth isn’t the only watery planet in the known universe, but it is the only fiery planet. The sun is mostly hydrogen undergoing nuclear fusion, not fire. And on other planets magma from volcanoes and lightning are also not fire. To get fire, it took billions of years of photosynthesis, which means fire can’t exist without life. And fire and life have been shaping each other ever since.

How Ancient Microbes Rode Bug Bits Out to Sea

S6 E11 / 8m 42s

Between 535 and 520 million years ago, a new kind of biological litter began collecting in the ancient oceans of the Cambrian period. Exoskeletons helped early arthropods expand in huge numbers throughout the world’s oceans. And tiny exoskeleton fragments may have allowed some of the most important microbes in the planet’s history to set sail out into the open ocean and change the world forever.

Our Most Mysterious Extinct Cousins

S6 E12 / 9m 41s

There was a group of hominins, those creatures more closely related to us than to chimpanzees, that did take a different, parallel journey from our ancestors. Our paths ran beside each other - and potentially even crossed at times - but while ours led us here, theirs led to extinction. What happened to Paranthropus and what can their fate tell us about our past?

Animals Are Older Than We Thought

S6 E13 / 11m 57s

What are animal-like fossils doing in rocks a billion years old, and what does that mean for our understanding of their evolution and geologic time itself? Turns out, there might've been a long, slow-burning fuse that ultimately ignited the Cambrian Explosion.

Why Is It So Hard to Tell the Sex of a Dinosaur?

S6 E14 / 12m 7s

While we think we know a lot about dinosaurs – like how they moved and what they ate – for a long time, we haven’t been able to ID one seemingly basic thing about their biology... Which are males and which are females?

How Snake Venom Sparked An Evolutionary Arms Race

S6 E15 / 9m 11s

For some, the rise and spread of venomous elapids was just another challenge to adapt to. For others, it was a catastrophe of almost apocalyptic proportions. And we humans are no exception, because it seems that when elapids slithered onto the ecological scene, not even our ancestors were safe…

What Was The Earliest Surgery?

S6 E16 / 7m 59s

When did practicing medicine - in its varied, complex forms (from sharing medicinal plants to the earliest surgeries) - become something that we actually started doing? While it’s a hard question to answer, it’s possible that our tendency to heal one another might have been with us for even longer than we've been human.

What Will Earth Be Like 300 Million Years From Now?

S6 E17 / 9m 34s

We spend a lot of time here on Eons looking backwards into deep time, visiting ancient chapters of our planet’s history. But this time, we’re taking a look towards the deep future. After all, the story is far from over. Here is what’s coming up next on planet Earth.

No Single Cradle of Humankind

S6 E19 / 10m 46s

It would take decades for paleontologists to realize that maybe there wasn’t just one so-called "cradle of humankind," and realize that maybe they’d been asking the wrong question all along.

The Second Time Sponges Took Over The World

S6 E20 / 8m 4s

Researchers have discovered a piece of a weird, but critical, time in the deep past…a time when the first-ever mass extinction may have turned Planet Earth into Sponge World.

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