If you're enjoying this podcast, we would love to tell you about Common Descent.

Common Descent is a podcast about paleontology, evolution, and the history of life on Earth,

hosted by two paleontologists with an unending enthusiasm for the wonders of the world.

Each episode cover science news, followed by a deep dive into a main topic requested by the audience.

Recent episodes of feature topics like eels, hibernation, and fungi.

In addition to the main series, Common Descent also features side projects that explore science and pop culture,

where the host examined the science and movies or speculate on the hypothetical evolution of fictional monsters.

Listen to Common Descent on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The smell of death and decay is unmistakable on the humid, salty breeze, and it's coming from

the sea, just visible in the distance. That scent seems like a bad sign,

but the sound of waves crashing on the shore draws you closer,

stumbling over rocks covered in a damp patchwork of vegetation.

These plants are small and spongy, just a few centimeters tall at most.

They're bryophytes, ancient liverworts and mosses. Flowers,

roots, and seeds haven't made their appearance here or anywhere else on the planet yet. And these

simple plants blanketing the ground are the only living things you see on land. As you get closer

and closer to the ocean, though, you start to notice the washed up

fragments of sea creatures piling up at the rack line, where the high tides strained marine debris

on the sand. Fragments of exoskeleton litter the beach, the broken bodies of crustaceans and other

ancient arthropods. Sea scorpions are rare here, but they number among the dead.

To your modern eyes, they look like a nightmarish hybrid of a horseshoe crab, a lobster, and a scorpion.

Trilobites haven't been spared either, though you can only see a few of their segmented, oval-shaped bodies,

...