Doctor Frankenstein’s favorite beer - The semiprecious stone amber is fossilized tree resin. Sometimes, insects and other small critters are trapped by sticky tree sap, and become encased in amber. Sometimes, microorganisms are found inside amber.

A walk through other dating methods - There are different candidates for the oldest preserved human footprints in North America. The older sight has a less certain date than the younger one. Today we look at ways of dating fossils,

Mystery solve, and dating fossils - It took a bit of digging, but I found out why the domestic dog fossil found with the remains of the La Brea woman didn’t cause more of a sensation. Using carbon 14 dating,

Wait… she had a dog? - The La Brea Woman was found in close association with the remains of a domesticated dog. Her remains have been dated to between 9,000 and 10,000 years ago. Were there dogs that early in North America?

Footprints in the sand, stone, and on the moon - Fossils aren’t just remains of animals. Some of them are materials and marks left by organisms as they went about their lives. Called "trace fossils," they are, instead of a snapshot of death,

The tar pit tar pits - In the previous episode we talked about where the oil that formed them came from. Today, we talk about the fossils found in them. Located in the middle of a major city, the La Brea Tar Pits have given up fossils as much as 55-th...

Fossils in fossil fuel - Around the same time that the ancestors of humans branched from the apes, organic sediments were being laid down that would eventually turn into oil. Some of this oil worked its way along fault lines,

Shadows in the stone - The Burgess Shale is a deposited of shale that was formed from large underwater avalanches that berried organisms around a half-billion years ago, preserving the soft parts of the bodies. However,

Learning the most from the least - Not all fossils are large bones of things like dinosaurs or mammoths. Some of them are small enough to require a microscope in order to identify them. Called microfossils, these tiny fragments,

Digging up the past - When I was a child, my family visit a dig site. They were excavating fossils of mammoths. Before we get back to examining natural history, we’ll spend a few episodes finding out where the evidence for the story comes from. -