How does an expert read an ancient fossil, and what stories can a specimen tell? In this video, Scott Evans, a palaeontologist and curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, offers some answers by walking viewers through the careful observation, data-gathering and interpretation that turn fossils into insight. Evans specialises in invertebrate palaeontology, and in particular the Ediacaran, a period more than 500 million years ago when the earliest complex life emerged on the seafloor.
Drawing on his fieldwork at Nilpena Ediacara National Park in Australia, he details how we know these early animals began to move, and how at least one species even favoured turning to one side over the other – the earliest known example of ‘handedness’. With 3D animation illustrating his findings, the video reveals how this ancient marine life connects to animals today, and how this knowledge might help shape our search for life on other planets. Video by American Museum of Natural History Human to fish, and back again: a brisk walk through our evolutionary history Why did our sea-dwelling ancestors leap to land?
It might have been the view Hohle Fels cave illuminates the rich symbolic world of Ice Age humans Take a shimmering, surreal swim with what might be the Earth’s oldest animals Watch as the whale becomes itself: slowly, slowly, from land to sea, through deep time The story of the 16 bones that upended how we see our species In 1938, a fish thought extinct for 65 million years resurfaced, nearly unchanged For 3 billion years, life was unicellular. Why did it start to collaborate?
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