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This ancient species had the same six legs and segmented body that we’d recognize from an ant today. But it also had a huge, scythe-like jaw and a horn coming out of its head. This bizarre predator belonged to a group known as “hell ants.” But they’re gone now, and we’re still trying to figure out why. -
It’s important to us that you understand how big this beaver was. Just like modern beavers, it was semiaquatic -- it lived both on the land and in the water. The difference is that today’s beavers do a pretty special thing - one that the giant beaver probably didn’t, or couldn’t, do.
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We’re the only primate without a coat of thick fur. It turns out that this small change in our appearance has had huge consequences for our ability to regulate our body temperature, and ultimately, it helped shape the evolution of our entire lineage. -
It arose from rhino ancestors that were a lot smaller, but Paraceratherium would take a different evolutionary path. -
At more than 2 meters long, Aegirocassis was not only the biggest radiodont ever, but it also may have been the biggest animal in the Early Ordovician. -
For some reason, animals keep evolving into things that look like crabs, independently, over and over again. -
While clubs are practically synonymous with ankylosaurs, we’ve only started to get to the bottom of how they worked and how this unusual anatomy developed in the first place. -
How and why does botanical carnivory keep evolving? It turns out that when any of the basic things that most plants need aren’t there, some plants can adapt in unexpected ways to make sure they thrive. -
Early primates not only lived in North America — our primate family tree actually originated here! So what happened to those early relatives of ours? -
These odd rodents belong to a genus known as Ceratogaulus, but they’re more commonly called horned gophers, because, you guessed it, they had horns. And it turns out the horns probably had a purpose - one that rodents would likely benefit from today. -
In 1977, a farmer was plowing his field on a plateau high in the Andes mountains when he stumbled upon a giant fossilized skeleton. -
Beneath layers of rock art are drawings of animals SO strange that, for a long time, some anthropologists thought they could only have been imagined.
