Awesome Evolution

Most science fiction would have us believe that aliens look like animals we might find on Earth, with features like eyes, ears, arms, and legs. But there’s a good chance creatures on other planets would be unrecognizable to us. Kurzgesagt digs into this imponderable and provides some thoughts on what alien life might look like on three very different planets.

If you browse YouTube regularly, you might have noticed certain trends and similarities between the most popular videos, from how their titles and thumbnails are presented to their duration. MinuteEarth explores this convergence and how video creators adapting to algorithms works kind of like animal evolution.

Video games have been simulating way that organisms thrive, evolve, and die ever since 1970 with John Conway’s, Game of Life. Over the years, simulations have become far more sophisticated but don’t always produce realistic results. Curious Archive looks at the strange evolution of games that simulate life.

Things that live in the ocean have evolved in curious ways. Ze Frank shows us how sharks have evolved some strange adaptations to move, thrive, and procreate underwater. For example, some sharks lay spiral-shaped eggs to blend in with kelp, while others have tiny toothlike structures on their skin that reduce drag to help them swim faster.

Nature can be weird, gross, and sometimes downright cruel. In this video from Ze Frank, we learn about a kind of bird that lays its eggs in another bird’s nest while they go off and make more babies. Sometimes they even eat the other bird’s eggs, and their eggs have even evolved to look like the ones they replaced.

Want to know about our genetic ancestors? American Museum of Natural History’s fascinating video takes us back to the moment where humans branched off from chimpanzees, and illustrates our progress via maps of significant archaeological discoveries.

It’s easy to make fun of T-Rex’s comically short arms, but clearly there must have been some reason this killer dino was saddled with such awkward appendages. MinuteEarth explores this seemingly odd trait, and some possible evolutionary explanations.

(PG-13: Language) There were human species before us, each of which is now extinct. Evolution led to us homo sapiens, who have managed to hang on largely because of our ability to communicate. exurb1a provides his cynical take on the state of the human race.