The Common Descent Podcast

It’s Episode 65, and you know what that means … extinction! This time, we address the ancient and confusing Late Devonian extinction. This is traditionally considered one of the “Big 5,” but it doesn…

Featuring paleoartist and herpetologist Gabriel Ugueto!
Follow Gabriel on Twitter (@SerpenIllus) or at his website, gabrielugueto.com, and listen to his herpetology podcast: squamatespod.com

Can yo…

Part 5 of 5 in this month’s series: KaiJune!

There’s a new Godzilla movie, and that means it’s time for more movie science! All June, we’ll be exploring giant monster movies, specifically looking at …

Part 4 of 5 in this month’s series: KaiJune!

There’s a new Godzilla movie, and that means it’s time for more movie science! All June, we’ll be exploring giant monster movies, specifically looking at …

The history of animal life on Earth has been shaped by sex. The struggle to reproduce puts unique evolutionary pressures on species which affect their behavior and even their physical form. Sexual se…

Part 3 of 5 in this month’s series: KaiJune!

There’s a new Godzilla movie, and that means it’s time for more movie science! All June, we’ll be exploring giant monster movies, specifically looking at …

Part 2 of 5 in this month’s series: KaiJune!

There’s a new Godzilla movie, and that means it’s time for more movie science! All June, we’ll be exploring giant monster movies, specifically looking at …

When it comes to exceptional forms of preservation, it’s hard to beat amber. These fossilized chunks of tree resin have provided some of the most incredible ancient remains ever found. In this episod…

Part 1 of 5 in this month’s series: KaiJune!

There’s a new Godzilla movie, and that means it’s time for more movie science! All June, we’ll be exploring giant monster movies, centering around two of …

It’s easy to see how fossils can teach us what ancient animals looked like, or how they evolved. But what about the ways they moved, ate, socialized, reproduced? In this episode, we explore the innov…

Turtles are so weird and wonderful. They're unlike any other living reptiles, mostly because they've turned their entire torso skeleton into an armor-home. A glimpse into the fossil record reveals th…

Many groups of life have conquered the land and water, but only four times in evolutionary history has life taken to the air. The most recent group to achieve flight are bats. Their combination of fl…

It was the late 1800s, and paleontology was just getting started in the Americas. Two prolific and passionate scientists, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, among the earliest prominent f…

Look who's back - our favorite paleobotanist, Aly Baumgartner!

And that means it’s time for more plants! As you may have noticed, the world around you is absolutely full of flowers. Angiosperms have …

In April 2018, we hosted this Sloth Chat Livestream!

Following up from Episode 24 (Sloths), we were joined by sloth scientists Ryan Haupt and Robert McAfee to answer audience questions about sloths, …

One of the main themes of this podcast is the evolutionary history of life. This concept is familiar to all of us today, but our current understanding of evolution is the culmination of a very long h…

Usually, when we talk about mass extinction, we’re referring to events long past. But scary levels of extinction are a fact of our current world, as well. So much so that current events have been lab…

Happy Darwin Day! Last year around this time, we were joined by Dr. Sarah Bray to discuss the life and times of Charles Darwin. This time, Sarah joins us again to discuss his colleague and natural se…

It's been called the most diverse of all bones. It comes in an incredible variety of shapes and sizes, living and fossil, scattered across the mammalian family tree. It's called the baculum, the os p…

What did dinosaurs sound like? How did extinct animals make and use sound? Like most behaviors, noises don’t fossilize, but there is some tantalizing evidence that paleontologists have pulled togethe…