Look at the various animals on Earth – or rather, look just behind them – and you’ll see a vast variety of tails! Tails and tail-like structures are often simple extensions of the body, and yet they’ve been adapted and modified into many shapes with many functions, and because they’re often so important to an animal’s lifestyle, they can be especially useful for paleontologists trying to understand ancient animals. In this episode, we’ll discuss definitions, diversity, functions, and fossils of tails.

In the news: drought fossils, early fish jaws, early fish fins, and paleontology video games.

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The Intro and Outro music is “On the Origin of Species” by Protodome.

Musical Interludes are "Professor Umlaut" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0