Your Body Survived 5 Apocalypses

Look at your hand. Five fingers. Some of your ancestors' closest relatives had eight. 🖐️ Five times, most species on Earth died out, and every one of your ancestors made it through all five. We run the 500-million-year relay race of your family tree: the big freeze, the fish crash, the Great Dying, the lava and the asteroid, and collect the souvenir each apocalypse left in your body: your jaw, your five fingers, a survival trick, night eyes, and the one you're using right now to watch this. Your turn: which souvenir is the best? The jaw, the five fingers, the night eyes, or seeing red? 👇 CHAPTERS 0:00 Look at your hand 0:42 The 500-million-year relay race 1:17 What counts as an apocalypse? 2:01 Apocalypse 1: the big freeze (jaws) 3:40 Apocalypse 2: eight fingers 5:52 Apocalypse 3: the Great Dying 8:05 Survival of the strongest? 8:38 Apocalypse 4: the night shift 9:53 Apocalypse 5: the asteroid (seeing red) 12:08 The baton never dropped 13:05 Recap 13:30 Count your fingers SOURCES • Barnosky et al. 2011, Nature 471:51 (Has the Earth's sixth mass extinction already arrived?) • Stanley 2016, PNAS 113:E6325 • Harper, Hammarlund & Rasmussen 2014, Gondwana Research 25:1294 • Hagiwara & Sallan 2026, Science Advances 12(2), doi:10.1126/sciadv.aeb2297 • Andreev et al. 2022, Nature 609:964 • Sallan & Coates 2010, PNAS 107:10131 • Sallan & Galimberti 2015, Science 350:812 • Coates & Clack 1990, Nature 347:66 • Clack 2002, Nature 418:72 • Daeschler, Shubin & Jenkins 2006, Nature 440:757 • Shubin, Daeschler & Jenkins 2006, Nature 440:764 • Burgess, Bowring & Shen 2014, PNAS 111:3316 • Sun et al. 2012, Science 338:366 (+ University of Leeds press release 2012) • Fernandez et al. 2013, PLoS ONE 8:e64978 • Botha-Brink et al. 2016, Scientific Reports 6:24053 • Botha 2020, PeerJ 8:e10408 • Rey et al. 2017, eLife 6:e28589 • Araújo et al. 2022, Nature 607:726 • Blackburn et al. 2013, Science 340:941 • Brusatte et al. 2008, Science 321:1485 • Gerkema et al. 2013, Proc R Soc B 280:20130508 • Borges et al. 2018, BMC Genomics 19:121 • Dulai et al. 1999, Genome Research 9:629 • Maor et al. 2017, Nature Ecology & Evolution 1:1889 • Alvarez et al. 1980, Science 208:1095 • Schulte et al. 2010, Science 327:1214 • Renne et al. 2013, Science 339:684 • Schoene et al. 2019, Science 363:862 • Sprain et al. 2019, Science 363:866 • During et al. 2022, Nature 603:91 • Longrich, Scriberas & Wills 2016, J Evol Biol 29:1495 • Wilson Mantilla et al. 2021, R Soc Open Sci 8:210050 • Lyson et al. 2019, Science 366:977 Fossil animals are drawn as friendly cartoons, not exact reconstructions; Tiktaalik, Thrinaxodon and Purgatorius are relatives of our ancestors, not proven direct ancestors. Illustrations made with AI image tools, then selected and edited by hand. Voice-over: CapCut text-to-speech. #science #evolution #extinction