The 10 Best The Common Descent Podcast Episodes
1) Episode 136 - Seahorses
Seahorses are very strange fish, with their upright posture, tube-like mouths, and various other unusual features. Along with their cousins in the family Syngnathidae, seahorses have been the subject ...Show More
2) Episode 131 - Volcanoes
Volcanoes are fascinating, devastating, and fundamental to Earth systems. Volcanic eruptions can transform ecosystems, landscapes, and even the atmosphere, and at their most extreme, the effects of vo...Show More
3) Episode 124 - Snowball Earth
An Earth covered in ice might sound far-fetched, but there’s reason to think it has actually happened in the past – more than once. In this episode, we examine the Snowball Earth hypothesis and the ge...Show More
4) Episode 157 - Bioluminescence and Biofluorescence
Glowing organisms might seem like something out of science fiction, but not only do they exist here on Earth, they are incredibly common. Some species glow when exposed to certain kinds of light, and ...Show More
5) Episode 154 - Live Birth
Viviparity is the reproductive style where embryos develop inside a parent’s body instead of inside an egg the parent lays. It’s a very familiar habit to us placental mammals, but it’s also an extreme...Show More
6) Episode 152 - The Jehol Biota
You might have noticed that over the last few decades, a lot of really exciting and famous fossil discoveries have been coming out of China. If you pay close attention, you might even catch that many ...Show More
7) Episode 145 - Photosynthesis
We live in a solar-powered world. Photosynthesis is the process by which some organisms (notably plants and cyanobacteria) harness the energy of sunlight to power their own metabolism, in the process ...Show More
8) Episode 139 - Vultures
Scavenging isn’t easy. There’s a reason most scavengers are only part-time carrion-eaters. But vultures are exquisitely adapted for a dedicated lifestyle of finding and feasting on carcasses, and as a...Show More
9) Episode 122 - Plate Tectonics
The Earth is in motion beneath our feet. The shifting and grinding of the tectonic plates is responsible for the shape of our planet’s surface and – directly or indirectly – nearly all the activity th...Show More
10) Episode 111 - Eusociality
There isn’t much on Earth quite like an ant colony or a beehive. Lots of animals are social, but relatively few are eusocial. It’s a bizarre lifestyle, living in large multi-generational colonies with...Show More