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Eons
Season 3 • Episode 39 • The Fuzzy Origins of the Giant Panda
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Eons Season 3, Episode 39: The Fuzzy Origins of the Giant Panda
How does a bear -- which is a member of the order Carnivora -- evolve into an herbivore? Despite how it looks, nothing about the history of the giant panda is black and white. Watch Eons Season 3, Episode 39 The Fuzzy Origins of the Giant Panda in HD free online. Enjoy high-quality streaming of Eons Season 3, Episode 39 and share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Episodes
39 episodesWhen Humans Were Prey
Not too long ago, our early human ancestors were under constant threat of attack from predators. And it turns out that this difficult chapter in our history may be responsible for the adaptations that allowed us to become so successful.
10 min
How Blood Evolved (Many Times)
Blood is one of the most revolutionary features in our evolutionary history. Over hundreds of millions of years, the way in which blood does its job has changed over and over again. As a result, we animals have our familiar red blood. But also blue blood. And purple, and green, and even white.
10 min
The Humans That Lived Before Us
As more and more fossil ancestors have been found, our genus has become more and more inclusive, incorporating more members that look less like us, Homo sapiens. By getting to know these other hominins--the ones who came before us--we can start to answer some big questions about what it essentially means to be human.
10 min
The Island of Shrinking Mammoths
The mammoths fossils found on the Channel Islands off the coast of southern California are much smaller than their relatives found on the mainland. They were so small that they came to be seen as their own species. How did they get there? And why were they so small?
10 min
The Evolution of the Heart (A Love Story)
In order to understand where hearts came from, we have to go back to the earliest common ancestor of everything that has a heart. It took hundreds of millions of years, and countless different iterations of the same basic structure to lead to the heart that you have today.
10 min
How 7,000 Years of Epic Floods Changed the World
Strange geologic landmarks in the Pacific Northwest are the lingering remains of a mystery that took nearly half a century to solve. These features turned out to be a result one of the most powerful and bizarre episodes in geologic history: this region experienced dozens of major, devastating floods over the course of more than 7,000 years.
10 min
The Island of Huge Hamsters and Giant Owls
Back in the late Miocene epoch, there was an island--or maybe a group of islands-- in the Mediterranean Sea that was populated with fantastic giant beasts. It’s a lesson in the very strange, but very real, powers of natural selection.
10 min
The Giant Bird That Got Lost in Time
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10 min
When We First Made Tools
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10 min
When Giant Scorpions Swarmed the Seas
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10 min
When We Tamed Fire
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10 min
The Mystery Behind the Biggest Bears of All Time
The short-faced bears turned out to be remarkably adaptable, undergoing radical changes to meet the demands of two changing continents. And yet, for reasons we don’t quite understand, their adaptability wasn’t enough to keep them from going extinct.
10 min
The Croc That Ran on Hooves
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10 min
When We Took Over the World
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10 min
The Ghostly Origins of the Big Cats
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10 min
The History of Climate Cycles (and the Woolly Rhino) Explained
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10 min
The Hellacious Lives of the "Hell Pigs"
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10 min
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10 min
When the Synapsids Struck Back
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10 min
When Ichthyosaurs Led a Revolution in the Seas
The marine reptiles Ichthyosaurs arose after The Great Dying, which wiped out at least 90 percent of life in the oceans, changing the seas forever and triggering a new evolutionary arms race between predator and prey.
10 min
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10 min
How Volcanoes Froze the Earth (Twice)
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10 min
How Earth's First, Unkillable Animals Saved the World
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10 min
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10 min
Was This Dinosaur a Cannibal?
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10 min
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10 min
The Raptor That Made Us Rethink Dinosaurs
In 1964, a paleontologist named John Ostrom unearthed some fascinating fossils from the mudstone of Montana. Its discovery set the stage for what’s known today as the Dinosaur Renaissance, a total re-thinking of what we thought we knew about dinosaurs.
10 min
When Bats Took Flight
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10 min
How Pterosaurs Got Their Wings
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10 min
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10 min
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The Case of the Dinosaur Egg Thief
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10 min
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10 min
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These hyaenodonts gave the world some of its largest terrestrial, carnivorous mammals ever known. And while these behemoths were the apex predators of their time, they were no match for a changing world.
10 min
Why Male Mammoths Lost the Game
Woolly mammoths, our favorite ice age proboscidean, disappeared from Europe and North America at the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. Today, we’ve teamed up with TierZoo to solve one of the mysteries about these charismatic megafauna: why do most remains of mammoths found in the fossil record turn out to be male?
10 min
The Forgotten Story of the Beardogs
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10 min
The Fuzzy Origins of the Giant Panda
How does a bear -- which is a member of the order Carnivora -- evolve into an herbivore? Despite how it looks, nothing about the history of the giant panda is black and white.
10 min