From PBS Eons. It arose from rhino ancestors that were a lot smaller, but Paraceratherium would take a different evolutionary path. Believe it or not, it actually became so big that it probably got close to what scientists think might be the actual upper limit for a land mammal.  The illustration of Paraceratherium used in…

From PBS Eons. Check out Bizarre Beasts! https://youtu.be/DtufV5JZLW4 At more than 2 meters long, Aegirocassis was not only the biggest radiodont ever, but it also may have been the biggest animal in the Early Ordovician. This bizarre marine giant may have only been possible, thanks to a major revolution among some of the tiniest organisms…

From PBS Eons. Help out Eons and take the PBS Digital Studios annual survey: http://to.pbs.org/2020survey For some reason, animals keep evolving into things that look like crabs, independently, over and over again. What is it about the crab’s form that makes it so evolutionarily successful that non-crabs are apparently jealous of it?  Thanks to Franz Anthony…

From PBS Eons. Our "Night at the Virtual Museum" livestream will now be streaming on both YouTube and Facebook. To celebrate National Fossil Day, PBS Eons hosts Kallie Moore, Blake de Pastino, and Michelle Barboza-Ramirez will be competing in a virtual scavenger hunt at the Smithsonian NMNH’s Deep Time exhibit, where their fossil knowledge will…

From PBS Eons. Take the PBS Digital Studios annual survey: http://to.pbs.org/2020survey Our National Fossil Day Livestream will be on Facebook and YouTube at 8 PM ET on October 14th. Here’s the link to the YouTube livestream: https://youtu.be/hW6XW1YgAlU While clubs are practically synonymous with ankylosaurs, we’ve only started to get to the bottom of how they…

From PBS Eons. Go check out Overview on PBS Terra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHMZwaopAaI Deep Look’s episode on Sundews! https://youtu.be/D4kBrsyWhS4 How and why does botanical carnivory keep evolving? It turns out that when any of the basic things that most plants need aren’t there, some plants can adapt in unexpected ways to make sure they thrive. Thanks to…

From PBS Eons. How To Vote in Every State: https://youtube.com/HowToVoteInEveryState Early primates not only lived in North America — our primate family tree actually originated here! So what happened to those early relatives of ours? Thank you to these paleoartists for allowing us to use their wonderful illustrations: Nobu Tamura: https://spinops.blogspot.com/ Julio Lacerda: https://twitter.com/JulioTheArtist Fabrizio…

From PBS Eons. These odd rodents belong to a genus known as Ceratogaulus, but they’re more commonly called horned gophers, because, you guessed it, they had horns. And it turns out the horns probably had a purpose – one that rodents would likely benefit from today. Samantha Hopkins’ 2005 paper on Ceratogaulus with figures featured in…

From PBS Eons. In 1977, a farmer was plowing his field on a plateau high in the Andes mountains when he stumbled upon a giant fossilized skeleton. How did this giant marine reptile end up high in the Andes Mountains? Spanish subtitles/CC by Carlos J. Pardo De la Hoz. Thanks as always to Ceri Thomas for…

From PBS Eons. Check out Self-Evident on PBS Voices: https://youtu.be/B6QeZ07Fagg Beneath layers of rock art are drawings of animals SO strange that, for a long time, some anthropologists thought they could only have been imagined. But what if these animals really had existed, after all? Thanks to the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation, Professor Bruno David, Monash…

From PBS Eons. Check out our new poster! https://store.dftba.com/collections/eons/products/supercontinent-poster To figure out how Thrinaxodon and Broomistega became entombed together, scientists looked at the burrow itself, along with their fossilized bones. And it looks like their luck ran out, when a behavior that usually would’ve helped them survive just didn’t work. Special thanks to Julio Lacerda…

From PBS Eons. Thanks to a recent adaptation, instead of getting sick from the boozy, fermented fruits, one of our primate ancestors could digest them safely, and get more calories at the same time. This new superpower would open up a whole new nutritional landscape for us: fermented foods. Special thanks to Julio Lacerda (https://twitter.com/JulioTheArtist)…

From PBS Eons. Paleontologists have been studying nodosaurs since the 1830s, but nobody had ever found a specimen like Borealopelta before. The key to its exceptional preservation was where it ended up after it died and how it got there. Thanks to the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology for providing us with images for this…

From PBS Eons. Untangling the origins of Beelzebufo — the giant frog that lived alongside the dinosaurs — turns out to be one of the most bedeviling problems in the history of amphibians.  Thank you to these paleoartists for allowing us to use their wonderful illustrations: Ceri Thomas: http://alphynix.tumblr.com/ Nobu Tamura: https://spinops.blogspot.com/ Julio Lacerda: https://252mya.com/gallery/julio-lacerda…

From PBS Eons. To try to solve the puzzle of Lark Quarry, experts have turned to a special subfield of paleontology — paleoichnology, or the study of trace fossils — to reconstruct exactly what happened on that spot, on that day, nearly 100,000 millennia ago. Thanks to Fabrizio de Rossi for the excellent reconstruction(s) of…

From PBS Eons. The rise and fall of ancient walruses, and how modern ones got their tusks, is a story that spans almost 20 million years. And while there are parts of the story that we’re still trying to figure out, it looks like tusks didn’t have anything to do with how or what these animals…