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Before the Cambrian Explosion came the weirdest chapter in animal history.

In this episode, we head back to the Ediacaran Period — a quiet world of microbial mats, shallow seas, and the first large, complex organisms trying out body plans for the very first time.

Meet Dickinsonia, the giant living pancake confirmed as an animal by ancient cholesterol. Meet fractal ferns, three-armed whirlpools, a tiny grain-of-rice burrower that may sit near our own branch of the tree of life, and a whole cast of creatures so strange scientists are still arguing over what they even were.

We’ll talk Snowball Earth, boneless fossils, how cells learned to specialize without a CEO cell, why the Ediacaran fossil record suddenly goes silent, and what a megalodon tooth can teach us about reconstructing lost worlds.

Welcome to Ediacaran Park: less running for your life, more staring at a fossil and asking, “What am I looking at here?”

Instagram: www.instagram.com/fromcellstous

Quiz: fromcellstous.com/episode13_quiz

Youtube: www.youtube.com/@fromcellstous

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For three billion years, life went solo.

Then one day, some cells forgot to separate after dividing — and that tiny accident changed the history of Earth.

In Episode 12 of From Cells to Us… How?!, we explore the rise of multicellular life: the first cells that learned to cooperate, the evolutionary battle against cheating cells (aka cancer), and how trillions of individual cells eventually became… you.

Because multicellularity didn’t just make life bigger.

It made complexity possible.

Instagram: www.instagram.com/fromcellstous

Sources and quiz: https://substack.com/@fromcellstousshow

Youtube: www.youtube.com/@fromcellstous

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Sex Didn’t Evolve to Make Babies

What if I told you sex didn’t evolve to reproduce?

A billion years ago, single-celled organisms were already doing something that looks a lot like sex — and it had nothing to do with babies.

No embryos. No development. No families.

Just two cells, briefly merging… shuffling their DNA… and separating again.

So why would evolution invent something so inefficient?

Why give up cloning — the fastest, simplest way to survive — for something slower, riskier, and more complicated?

The answer involves parasites, broken DNA, and a billion-year-old survival strategy that’s still running inside your body right now.

Ep 11 quiz: https://fromcellstous.com/episode11_quiz

Instagram: www.instagram.com/fromcellstous

Youtube: www.youtube.com/@fromcellstous

Sources and more: https://substack.com/@fromcellstousshow