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Eons
Season 2 • Episode 13 • What Was the Ancestor of Everything?
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Eons Season 2, Episode 13: What Was the Ancestor of Everything?
The search for our origins go back to a single common ancestor -- one that remains shrouded in mystery. It’s the ancestor of everything we know and today scientists call it the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA. Watch Eons Season 2, Episode 13 What Was the Ancestor of Everything? in HD free online. Enjoy high-quality streaming of Eons Season 2, Episode 13 and share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Episodes
45 episodesHow Two Microbes Changed History
What if I told you that, more than two billion years ago, some tiny living thing started to live inside another living thing … and never left? And now, the descendants of both of those things are in you?
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The Time Terror Birds Invaded
About 5 million years ago, a new predator made its way from the south and onto the coastal plains of North America. It was a giant, flightless, carnivorous bird and came to be known by one of the coolest and most richly earned nicknames in all of paleontology: the terror bird.
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Untangling the Devil's Corkscrew
In the late 1800s, paleontologists in Nebraska found huge coils of hardened sand stuck deep in the earth. Local ranchers called them Devil's Corkscrews and scientists called them Daemonelix. It was clear these corkscrews were created by some form of life, but what?
10 min
The Great Snake Debate
90 million years ago, an ancient snake known as Najash had...legs. It is by no means the only snake to have limbs either. But what’s even stranger: we’re not at all sure where it came from.
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The Whole Saga of the Supercontinents
The study of natural history is the study of how the world has changed but Earth itself is in a constant state of flux -- because the ground beneath your feet is always moving. So if we want to know how we got here, we have to understand how "here" got here.
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From the Cambrian Explosion to the Great Dying
The first era of our current eon, the Paleozoic Era, is probably the most deceptively fascinating time in Earth’s history. With near constant revolutions in life, punctuated by catastrophic extinctions, it is also one of the most chaotic.
10 min
How Sex Became a Thing
We don’t know which living thing was the very first to arrive at the totally revolutionary process that is sexual reproduction but we can follow the history of how (and why) sex became a thing.
10 min
The Other Explosion You Should Know About
Fossils found around the world suggest that multi-cellular life was not only present before the Cambrian Explosion, it was much more elaborate and diverse than anyone thought. This is the story of the sudden burst of diversity that marked the dawn of truly complex life on our planet.
10 min
How the Turtle Got Its Shell
Where did turtles come from? And how did the they get their shells? The answers to these questions would eventually cause scientists to rethink the entire history of reptile evolution.
10 min
What a Dinosaur Looks Like Under a Microscope
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10 min
The Most Useful Fossils in the World
For decades, one of the most abundant kinds of fossils on Earth, numbering in the millions of specimens, was a mystery to paleontologists. But geologists discovered that these mysterious fossils could basically be used to tell time in the deep past.
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Inside the Dinosaur Library
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10 min
What Was the Ancestor of Everything?
The search for our origins go back to a single common ancestor -- one that remains shrouded in mystery. It’s the ancestor of everything we know and today scientists call it the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA.
10 min
How the Squid Lost Its Shell
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10 min
How the Chalicothere Split In Two
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10 min
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The Weird, Watery Tale of Spinosaurus
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Where Did Viruses Come From?
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When Fish First Breathed Air
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How the T-Rex Lost Its Arms
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10 min
When Fish Wore Armor
420 million years ago, some fish were more medieval. They wore armor, sometimes made of big plates, and sometimes made of interlocking scales. But that armor may actually have served a totally different purpose, one that many animals still use today.
10 min
When Birds Had Teeth
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10 min
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Ratites have spread to Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and South America. And there are fossils of Ratites in Europe, Asia, and North America too. That’s a lot of ground to cover for birds that can’t fly. So how did Ratites end up all over the world?
10 min
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10 min
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The story of sloths is one of astounding ecological variability, with some foraging in the seas, others living underground, and others still hiding from predators in towering cliffs. So why are their only living relatives in the trees?
10 min
When Sharks Swam the Great Plains
If you’ve ever been to, or lived in, or even flown over the central swath of North America, then you’ve seen the remnants of what was a uniquely fascinating environment. Scientists call it the Western Interior Seaway, and at its greatest extent, it ran from the Caribbean Sea to the Canadian Arctic.
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10 min
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