EONS: LIFE AND DEATH ON PANGEA to Make Series Premiere on PBS
Hosts Michelle Barboza-Ramirez, Blake de Pastino, Kallie Moore, and Gabriel-Philip Santos lead the six-part PBS Digital Studios series.
PBS is set to premiere EONS: LIFE AND DEATH ON PANGEA, a new six-part series, on July 29 on the PBS App, PBS.org, the Eons YouTube channel, and PBS stations. Hosted by science communicators and paleontology experts Michelle Barboza-Ramirez, Blake de Pastino, Kallie Moore, and Gabriel-Philip Santos, the series examines the Great Dying, the mass extinction event at the end of the Permian Period during which more than 80 percent of Earth's species disappeared. The first episode traces the formation of the supercontinent Pangea and its effects on life beginning in the Late Carboniferous Period, with field segments filmed at locations including the Joggins Fossil Cliffs in Nova Scotia, Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas, and the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.
The six-part PBS Digital Studios series combines field exploration, expert insight, and cinematic storytelling to bring one of Earth's most dramatic chapters to life. Through animations and newly created, scientifically informed reconstructions of prehistoric plants and animals, the series immerses audiences in a world of supercontinents, mega-monsoons, bizarre creatures, and planet-shaping catastrophes.
A series preview is available at PBS.org.
Episode 1: 'How the Formation of Pangea Changed the World'
Premieres: Wednesday, July 29 on PBS App, PBS.org, the Eons YouTube channel, and PBS stations (check local listings).
The Great Dying at the end of the Permian Period was the worst mass extinction in the entire history of life on Earth. It was the closest that complex life ever came to being extinguished altogether. But what really made the Great Dying such a disaster was that, in the Permian itself, life had been thriving in ways it never had before. To understand the full story of the time that almost everything died, we have to start tens of millions of years earlier, in an ancient swampy forest. In the Late Carboniferous Period, predatory amphibians and giant arthropods ruled the swamps of what's now Nova Scotia. But among the plants and vertebrates of this time, a REVOLUTION was underway: new groups had arisen that could break their ties to the water entirely. These were seed plants and amniotes, and their adaptations to drier climates would give them a leg up in the Permian to come as the supercontinent of Pangea formed, the Carboniferous rainforests collapsed, and the land became more arid. And this wasn't the only evolutionary REVOLUTION taking place: the amniotes were already splitting into the two groups that would become reptiles and the ancestors of mammals.
Locations Featured in Episode 1:
Joggins Fossil Cliffs, Joggins, Nova Scotia
Guadalupe Mountains National Park, TX
Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, Boston, MA
Montana DNRC Conservation Seedling Nursery, Missoula, MT
University of Montana, Missoula, MT
EONS: LIFE AND DEATH ON PANGEA marks an expansion of the PBS Digital Studios Eons brand, which has accumulated more than 757 million video views and 3.17 million YouTube subscribers over nearly a decade as a digital science series, into longform television programming.
