NaN/100 votes#1 - That Time the Mediterranean Sea Disappeared
Season 4 Episode 1 - Aired 1/9/2020
How could a body of water as big as the Mediterranean just...disappear? It would take decades and more than 1,000 research studies to even start to figure out the cause -- or causes -- of one of the greatest vanishing acts in Earth’s history.
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#2 - The Neanderthals That Taught Us About Humanity
Season 4 Episode 2 - Aired 1/16/2020
Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Neandertals were thought to have been…primitive. Unintelligent, hunched-over cavemen, for lack of a better word. But the discoveries made in that Iraqi cave provided some of the earliest clues that Neanderthals actually behaved -- and likely thought and felt -- a lot like we do.
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#3 - The Giant Dinosaur That Was Missing a Body
Season 4 Episode 3 - Aired 1/28/2020
From end to end, its forelimbs alone measured an incredible 2.4 meters long and were tipped with big, comma-shaped claws. But other than its bizarre arms, very little material from this dinosaur had been found: no skull, no feet, almost nothing that could give experts a fuller picture of what this dinosaur actually was.
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#4 - How South America Made the Marsupials
Season 4 Episode 4 - Aired 2/4/2020
Throughout the Cenozoic Era -- the era we’re in now -- marsupials and their metatherian relatives flourished all over South America, filling all kinds of ecological niches and radiating into forms that still thrive on other continents.
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#5 - A Short Tale About Diplodocus' Long Neck
Season 4 Episode 5 - Aired 2/11/2020
Long necks gave sauropods a huge advantage when it came to food, but not in the way you think. And this benefit would allow them to become the biggest terrestrial animals of all time!
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#6 - When the Rainforests Collapsed
Season 4 Episode 6 - Aired 2/19/2020
The Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse set the stage for a takeover that would be a crucial turning point in the history of terrestrial animal life. If it weren’t for that time when the rainforests collapsed - in an extinction event that you probably haven’t heard of - our ancestors might never have made it out of the swamps.
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#7 - How a Hot Planet Created the World's Biggest Snake
Season 4 Episode 7 - Aired 2/27/2020
About 59 million years ago, the largest animal lurking in the ancient forests of Colombia by far was Titanoboa - the largest snake ever known. It’s only been in the past few years that we’ve put together the many pieces of this puzzling creature, but it turns out that the greatest snake that the world ever saw was made possible by a warming planet.
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#8 - When the Sahara Was Green
Season 4 Episode 8 - Aired 3/10/2020
The climate of the Sahara was completely different thousands of years ago. And we’re not talking about just a few years of extra rain. We’re talking about a climate that was so wet for so long that animals and humans alike made themselves at home in the middle of the Sahara.
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#9 - When Penguins Went From The Sky To The Sea
Season 4 Episode 9 - Aired 3/18/2020
Today, we think of penguins as small-ish, waddling, tuxedo-birds. But they evolved from a flying ancestor, were actual giants for millions of years, and some of them were even dressed a little more casually.
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#10 - How the Egg Came First
Season 4 Episode 10 - Aired 3/25/2020
The story of the egg spans millions of years, from the first vertebrates that dared to venture onto land to today’s mammals, including the platypus, and of course birds. Like chickens? We’re here to tell you: The egg came first.
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#11 - How Dogs (Eventually) Became Our Best Friends
Season 4 Episode 11 - Aired 3/31/2020
We’re still figuring out the details, but most scientists agree that it took thousands of years of interactions to develop our deep bond with dogs. When did they first become domesticated? Where did this happen? And what did the process look like, in terms of genetics and anatomy?
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#12 - When a Billion Years Disappeared
Season 4 Episode 12 - Aired 4/15/2020
In some places, the rocks below the Great Unconformity are about 1.2 billion years older than those above it. This missing chapter in Earth’s history might be linked to a fracturing supercontinent, out-of-control glaciers, and maybe the diversification of life itself.
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#13 - The Risky Paleo Diets of Our Ancestors
Season 4 Episode 13 - Aired 4/22/2020
We can track our history of eating just about anything back through the fossil record and see the impact it’s had on our evolution. Throughout time, part of the secret to our success as a species has been our early - and sometimes fatal - experimentation with food.
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#14 - How the Andes Mountains Might Have Killed a Bunch of Whales
Season 4 Episode 14 - Aired 4/29/2020
At a site known as Cerro Ballena or Whale Hill, there are more than 40 skeletons of marine mammals -- a graveyard of ocean life dating back 6.5 million to 9 million years ago, in the Late Miocene Epoch. But the identity of the killer that they finally settled on might surprise you.
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#15 - How Plants Caused the First Mass Extinction
Season 4 Episode 15 - Aired 5/12/2020
In the middle of the Cambrian, life on land was about to get a little more crowded. And those newcomers would end up changing the world. The arrival of plants on land would make the world colder, drain much of the oxygen out of the oceans and eventually, it would help cause a massive extinction event.
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#16 - The Two Viruses That We’ve Had For Millions of Years
Season 4 Episode 16 - Aired 5/20/2020
There’s one kind of herpesvirus that’s specific to one species of primate, and each virus split off from the herpesvirus family tree when the primate split off from its own tree. But of course, humans are a special kind of primate.
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#17 - How We Identified One of Earth’s Earliest Animals
Season 4 Episode 17 - Aired 5/28/2020
Scientists had no idea what type of organisms the life forms of the Ediacaran were—lichen, colonies of bacteria, fungi or something else. It turns out, the key to solving the puzzle of Precambrian life was a tiny bit of fossilized fat.
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#18 - When Dinosaur Look-Alikes Ruled the Earth
Season 4 Episode 18 - Aired 6/9/2020
There were a huge number of croc-like animals that flourished during the Triassic Period. Dinosaurs had just arrived on the scene but it was these animals that truly ruled the Earth, becoming both abundant and diverse.
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#19 - The World Before Plate Tectonics
Season 4 Episode 19 - Aired 6/16/2020
There was a time in Earth’s history that was so stable, geologists once called it the Boring Billion. But the fact is, this period was anything but boring. In fact, it set the stage for our modern version of plate tectonics - and probably for the rise of life as we know it.
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#20 - When Dinosaurs Chilled in the Arctic
Season 4 Episode 20 - Aired 6/24/2020
All told, the Arctic in the Cretaceous Period was a rough place to live, especially in winter. And yet, the fossils of many kinds of dinosaurs have been discovered there. So how were they able to survive in this harsh environment?
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#21 - How the Walrus Got Its Tusks
Season 4 Episode 21 - Aired 7/7/2020
The rise and fall of ancient walruses, and how modern ones got their tusks, is a story that spans almost 20 million years. And while there are parts of the story that we’re still trying to figure out, it looks like tusks didn’t have anything to do with how or what these animals ate.
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#22 - The Story of the Dino Stampede
Season 4 Episode 22 - Aired 7/16/2020
To try to solve the puzzle of Lark Quarry, experts have turned to a special subfield of paleontology -- paleoichnology, or the study of trace fossils -- to reconstruct exactly what happened on that spot, on that day, nearly 100,000 millennia ago.
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#23 - The Biggest Frog that Ever Lived
Season 4 Episode 23 - Aired 7/23/2020
Untangling the origins of Beelzebufo -- the giant frog that lived alongside the dinosaurs -- turns out to be one of the most bedeviling problems in the history of amphibians.
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#24 - The Dinosaur Who Was Buried at Sea
Season 4 Episode 24 - Aired 8/5/2020
Paleontologists have been studying these dinosaurs since the 1830s, but nobody had ever found a specimen like Borealopelta before. The key to all of this exceptional preservation was where ended up after it died and how it got there.
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#25 - How We Figured Out Fermentation
Season 4 Episode 25 - Aired 8/13/2020
Thanks to a recent adaptation, instead of getting sick from the boozy, fermented fruits, one of our primate ancestors could digest them safely, and get more calories at the same time. This new superpower would open up a whole new nutritional landscape for us: fermented foods.
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The Best Episodes of Eons Season 4
Every episode of Eons Season 4 ranked from best to worst. Discover the Best Episodes of Eons Season 4!
Join hosts Hank Green, Kallie Moore, and Blake de Pastino as they take you on a journey through the history of life on Earth. From...
Genre:Documentary
Season 4 Ratings Summary
"That Time the Mediterranean Sea Disappeared" is the best rated episode of "Eons" season 4. It scored N/A/10 based on 0 votes. Directed by N/A and written by N/A, it aired on 1/9/2020. This episode is rated NaN points higher than the second-best, "The Neanderthals That Taught Us About Humanity".