A truly enormous ichthyosaur around the size of a modern sperm whale, reached its size within just a few million years of taking to the water - a blink of an eye in evolutionary time.

The ecological niche of apex predators was empty on Hateg Island, waiting to be occupied by something large, mobile, and powerful enough to fill it.

Today, all mammals from humans to bats have five fingers or fewer. Yes, even whales, whose finger bones are hidden in their fins. Birds have four or fewer and amphibians get the best of both worlds, often having four digits on their “hands” and five on their “feet.” But no species of vertebrates have more than five digits, let alone eight!

Do our modern horses descend from just one domesticated population, or did it happen many times, in many places?

As revolutionary as teeth were, they would go on to disappear in some groups of vertebrates. But why?

We often think of dinosaurs as either preying on other dinos or mammals, or as plant-eaters -- but in ecosystems today, those aren’t the only two options. So why would we expect dinosaurs to have only been carnivores or herbivores, with the occasional omnivore thrown in the mix?

The Snake Detection Hypothesis proposes that the ability to quickly spot and avoid snakes is deeply embedded in primates, including us - an evolutionary consequence of the danger snakes have posed to us over millions of years.

Around 10,000 years ago, somewhere in Africa, a microscopic parasite made a huge leap. With a little help from a mosquito, it left its animal host - probably a gorilla - and found its way to a new host: us.

If you know one thing about pterosaurs, it’s that they’re flyers. And while pterosaurs may be well-known for their domination of the skies in the Mesozoic Era, they didn’t live their entire lives in the air.

The hardened residue scraped off your teeth at the dentist is called your dental calculus, and your dental calculus is the only part of your body that actually fossilizes while you’re alive!