Baby’s brain before birth - As we continue our close look at the human brain, we take some time to look at how it grows and develops. The story starts before you are born, when a man and woman love each other very much, and…

The lowly, yet complex, neuron - Finally done with natural history, today we start talking about the brain. It is extremely complicated. Even a single brain cell, one neuron, is an intricate little machine. Today we take a look at the neuron,

The Pleistocene Ice and rat poo - For our final episode on the topic of natural history, we take a look at the Pleistocene. This epoch was the most recent ice age, and toward the end of this time, lots of the largest land mammals went extinct,

The Pliocene: big bears, big cats, and a really big flood - I managed to talk Phil into co-hosting again, even though he’s far away. Thanks to the internet, we talked about the Pliocene. At the beginning of this time,

A few fragments - Though Phil is gone, his voice is not. Not quite yet. We spoke much more last time than made it in the episode. Some of what we talked about was interesting and/or amusing, so I stuck together another episode with it.

A farewell to Phil - Sadly, my brother Phil is leaving the show. We spent this episode just chatting about the show and a number of other things. First off, here’s a link to the mud server, where you can play the rather slapdash game that we have...

The Miocene, the right teeth for the right job - Today we chat about the Miocene. During this epoch, kelp forest spread along the shoreline, creating habitat for otters and pinnipeds. The climate cooled and forest gave way to open grassland.

The Oligocene, getting cold and growing huge - Today we talk about the Oligocene epoch, when the climate cooled and forest gave way to areas of open land. Grass spread beyond the lake shores and river sides where it had been living,

The Eocene, giant birds and proto-herds - We cover the Eocene epoch, including early horses that lived in forests, but didn’t climb trees. We also had early forms of bores, rhinos, whales and primates.

Why would Paleocene males lay eggs? - Today, Phil and I get back to talking about the history of life and evolution, with the Paleocene epoch. During this time the birds spread out and diversify, along with the mammals.