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The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Reef | Life and Death on Pangea
Season 9
Episode 3
Life in the Middle Permian Period flourished. Gigantic reef complexes stretched for hundreds of kilometers in what’s now the Texas desert, while strange mammal-relatives and huge reptiles thrived on land. But this epoch ends in a crushing extinction.
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25:37
The first saber-teeth and tusks evolve in the Late Permian and our ancestors, the cynodonts, appear.
25:37
The first herbivorous vertebrates evolve on the side of the amniote family tree leading to mammals.
25:37
Seed plants and amniotes adapt to dry climates, helping them thrive on Pangea in the Permian Period.
9:11
How did Homotherium evolve to be so successful? The answer may lie in the rise of the Tibetan plate.
10:16
The mystery of what non-flying dinosaurs were doing with their feathered wings has a new hypothesis.
11:45
What did ancient people once know about these bizarre megafauna that we’ve since forgotten?
7:44
5,700 years ago, woolly mammoths crossed a remote tundra island off Alaska.
9:48
Why did vertebrates conquer both the land and the air before the depths of the sea?
8:27
Long-extinct dinosaurs may still haunt us—possibly driving us to age faster than any vertebrate.
9:34
Only twice in Earth's history have supermountains risen, and both times reshaped life forever.
10:05
500+ pterosaur fossils found at Solnhofen may be hiding a dark secret distorting our view of them.