The Common Descent Podcast

Over the past several hundred thousand years, Australia has witnesed numerous ice age cycles, ecosystems dominated by giant marsupials, the arrival of humans, the extinction of those giant animals, an...

8 Apr 20181h 33min

Before life as we know it, and before even the Cambrian Explosion, there was a time when the Earth was home to an assortment of strange squishy creatures so unusual that they defy most of our best att...

25 Mar 20181h 40min

Everybody poops! Throughout the history of life on Earth, animals of all lifestyles have been littering the planet with little presents, and those few that fossilize become coprolites: unique time cap...

11 Mar 20181h 36min

In the earliest millennia of vertebrate life on Earth, the seas were home to the placoderms, a diverse group of extinct armored fish whose evolutionary innovations set the stage for some of the most i...

25 Feb 20181h 41min

Happy Darwin Day! In honor of Chuck's birthday (Feb 12), we are joined this episode by Dr. Sarah Bray of the Discovering Darwin podcast, to chat about the man whose research and writings laid the grou...

11 Feb 20181h 35min

This episode, we explore the evolutionary innovation that brought us a diversity of animal companions, from corgis to cattle to cauliflower, and jump-started our species’ rise to world dominance: Dome...

28 Jan 20181h 30min

This episode, we look to the stars! Our discussion takes a tour across the field of astrobiology, the broad and thought-provoking science that seeks to answer the questions of how life arises, where i...

14 Jan 20181h 44min

In this episode, we firmly establish a tradition of extinction-talk! This time, by request, it’s the latest major prehistoric extinction in Earth history, the event that took from us the mammoths, gro...

31 Des 20171h 40min