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Eons | PBS

Eons | PBS

  • This is not a Game of Thrones fan fiction episode. Dire wolves were real! And thousands of them died in the same spot in California. Their remains have taught us volumes about how they lived, hunted, died and way more about any animal’s sex life than you’d ever want to know.
  • Over the first season of PBS Eons, we’ve explored the history of Earth from the very origins of life right up to the Cenozoic Era that we’re in now. To celebrate our first anniversary together, we’d like to answer some of your most frequently asked questions.
  • Tyrannosaurus rex was big, Tyrannosaurus rex was vicious, and Tyrannosaurus rex had tiny arms. The story of how T-Rex lost its arms is, itself, pretty simple. But the story of why it kept those little limbs, and how it used them? Well, that’s a little more complicated.
  • 385 million years ago, a group of fish would undertake one of the most important journeys in the history of life and become the first vertebrates to live on dry ground. But first, they had to acquire the ability to breathe air.
  • A huge and diverse subfamily of dogs, the bone-crushers patrolled North America for more than thirty million years, before they disappeared in the not-too-distant past. So what happened to the biggest dogs that ever lived?
  • There are fossils of viruses, of sorts, preserved in the DNA of the hosts that they’ve infected. Including you. This molecular fossil trail can help us understand where viruses came from, how they evolved and it can even help us tackle the biggest question of all: Are viruses alive?
  • The Triassic was full of creatures that look a lot like other, more modern species, even though they’re not closely related at all. The reason for this has to do with how evolution works and with the timing of the Triassic itself: when life was trapped between two mass extinctions.
  • At the beginning of the Triassic Period, with the continents locked together from pole-to-pole in the supercontinent of Pangea, the world is hot, flat, and very, very dry. But then 234 million years ago, the climate suddenly changed for the wetter.
  • After taking you on a journey through geologic time, we've arrived at the Cenozoic Era. Most of the mammals and birds that you can think of appeared during this era but perhaps more importantly, the Cenozoic marks the rise of organisms that look a lot like us.
  • In 1912, a fossil collector discovered some strange bone fragments in the eerie, beautiful Cretaceous Bahariya rock formation of Egypt. Eventually, that handful of fossil fragments would reveal to scientists one of the strangest dinosaurs that ever existed -- the world’s only known semi-aquatic dinosaur.