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While we often think of brains as some kind of triumph over brawn, it turns out that those two things might not be mutually exclusive, and in fact, they’ve been linked for far longer than we might imagine.

Ancient weeds began mimicking early crops again and again over the course of the agricultural revolution, as ancient farmers made similar mistakes in different places at different times.And it turns out, some of our closest plant friends today actually started out as uninvited guests that hid their true identity. From a certain evolutionary point of view, these plants tricked us into domesticating them. But this mimicry came with a dark side – along with some accidental plant friends emerged an accidental plant enemy, too.

It seems that for flowering plants to take over the world, first they may have had to help burn the old one away…and then put those fires out.

If you’ve ever experienced dental pain, you've probably wondered why our teeth would evolve to function like an oversensitive alarm system. To find the answer, we have to go way back to when teeth first evolved, as part of the armored skin of ancient fish.

At the Solnhofen formation in Germany, over 500 fossils of 15 pterosaur species have been found. But it might be hiding a dark secret, one that’s been massively distorting our view of who was living and dying there, and why they left so much evidence behind.

Of all the names given to this dinosaur over the years, maybe T. rex shouldn't have been the one that stuck at all…

Supermountains are so ridiculously enormous that, as far as we know, they’ve only ever formed twice, far back in deep time, and they lasted for just a small fraction of our planet’s history. And both of the times when Earth had supermountains seem to coincide with some of the most profound evolutionary shifts in the history of life.

Even though the dinosaurs that once hunted us are long gone, we still, in a sense, may be living in their shadows… Because, it turns out, those terrible lizards might be the reason we age faster than any other vertebrate group.

Despite starting out in the water, the fossil record suggests that vertebrates conquered both the land and the air before they conquered the depths.

About 5,700 years ago, on a small, isolated island off the coast of Alaska, a herd of woolly mammoths crossed a treeless tundra.

Even though we once knew them pretty well, firsthand knowledge of giant sloths is now lost to time – including some of the most basic aspects of their biology and behavior. So, what did ancient people once know about these bizarre megafauna that we’ve since forgotten?

The question of what non-flying dinosaurs were doing with their feathered wings – and why they originally evolved in the first place – has been a mystery since they were discovered. But thanks to what might just be one of the strangest experiments in the recent history of paleontology – involving a makeshift robot-dino – a new hypothesis has emerged…

How did Homotherium evolve to be so successful, and so different from basically all other cats, living and extinct? Well the answer may lie in a huge geological event: the rise of the Tibetan plateau.

Hey Eons fans, after 8 seasons of exploring deep time we have some very important news to share... we've secretly been working on more stuff! We made a TV Show! Eons: Life and Death on Pangea. The series premieres with 2 episodes dropping on Wednesday, July 29 on the PBS app, website, and other platforms and the very first episode will also live here on Youtube.

For 3 million years, microbes ruled the Earth. But were these tiny survivors just lucky? Or did they play a more sinister role in the greatest disaster our planet has ever faced?

How and when did tetrapods move into the trees? And why? Turns out, the story of climbing may have less to do with trees and more to do with their leaves.

This is a tale about sails, and the enigma of why, for a brief but critical phase in the history of life, sporting a big biological billboard was all the rage.

What was it about the Great Dying that caused a global age of mutant plants? And could figuring it out help us avoid triggering the next one?

In the early 20th century, it was discovered there was a point in the fossil record where most European mammals just…vanished, only to be replaced with others native to Asia. While you’ve probably never heard of this extinction, it was the biggest one since the end of the dinosaurs, nearly taking out our primate ancestors, and by extension, us.

Pumpkins only survived thanks to an unlikely partnership they forged with another type of mammal. One that still found them to be toxic and disgusting at first, but could see the potential in the relationship. Us.