Eons

If we can see ourselves in the way our ancient cousins dealt with death…what else could we have in common?

Thanks to our ability to develop and share complex learned behaviors across generations - a thing we sometimes call culture - we have become the ultimate niche builders.

They may not look like much, but beneath that shell lies an evolutionary mystery - one that stumped the biggest names in natural history for over a hundred years.

Did our most famous fossil ancestor, Lucy, die by falling out of a tall tree? The answer is part of a decades-long debate over how, exactly, our ancestors transitioned from life in the trees to life on the ground.

In Australia, evolution built a family of deadly predators by taking a group of cute, harmless herbivores and turning them murderous.

Maybe it’s a little self-centered that we can be pretty focused on the DNA that we got from Neanderthals – but we shouldn’t forget that gene flow goes both ways.

How did seahorses — one of the ocean’s worst swimmers — spread around the globe? And where did they come from in the first place?

The unexpected discovery of an entirely new domain of life was pretty huge and surprising - even if archaea do just look like bacteria. But, in recent years, it’s been their connection to us that's turned out to be particularly full of surprises - ones that may mean we have a connection to a group known as Asgard.

Charles Darwin encountered a tiny fox-like creature during his famous voyage but instead of discovering its fascinating evolutionary story, he just knocked it on the head with his geology hammer.

Around the time that some of our fishapod relatives were crawling out of the water, others were turning around and diving right back in.

Mercury, Venus, and Mars are all super low on water – so where did ours come from and why do we have so much of it? We think our water came from a few unlikely sources: meteorites, space dust, and even the sun.