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Do humans drive species to extinction? Yes. We see it today. We saw it with bison when settlers went west. Big, slow animals are easy targets. @BenLamm from @colossal discusses the relationship between early human arrival and megafauna populations - humans show up, big animals

The woolly mouse. Here's what it is and why it matters. Testing mammoth gene edits on elephants is ethically dubious, so a solution was required. Despite a 200M year genetic divergence between mice and elephants, @BenLamm and his team from @colossal used computational analysis

Marine mammals at 1,000-to-1 extinction rate. One in a thousand still exists. That's not just a conservation tragedy - it's an ocean circulation crisis. Whales dive deep to feed, then return to the surface, bringing nutrients up. That circulation feeds plankton, which produces

Fast forward 1,000 years. 100 generations. What does Earth look like? What does humanity look like? We'll have mastered synthetic biology. AI and digital twins will help us understand how to shape entire ecosystems - not just preserve them, but design them. Ben from @colossal

You can bring back dodos and mammoths. But if the land isn't ready and the ecosystems aren't prepared, it doesn't help. That’s why Ben and his team from @colossal are trying to figure out how to bring back these beautiful creatures into environments where they can thrive. We

We're in the sixth mass extinction. In the next 25 years, we could lose up to 50% of biodiversity. Some of that is natural extinction - survival of the fittest. But most is human-caused: overfishing, ocean acidification and warming, deforestation, pollution, overhunting. If

Ben and his team from @colossal made 20 genetic edits to create a dire wolf. Only 20. That might sound small, but no one has ever made that many precision edits to resurrect an extinct species. These are the most genetically modified organisms in the world. You can't clone from

Everyone has an opinion on de-extinction ethics. Here's theirs. They're not trying to persuade anyone. Their approach is transparency and education - make the science accessible, encourage conversation, let people form their own conclusions. Science shouldn't be locked behind

Predators get a bad rap. People are afraid of them or imagine ecosystems would be better, more utopian, without them. But ecosystems without predators don't thrive - they collapse in different ways. Ben (@colossal ) talks about how predators typically kill the young, the sick,

Most people think dodos went extinct because they were stupid or delicious. Neither is true. Ben (@ColossalBio) explains that because dodos were ground-dwelling birds that laid eggs on the ground, they had no natural predators. Then settlers introduced rats, monkeys, and pigs

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Michael (@MichaelButtonX ) points to artifacts suggesting ancient humans understood far more mathematics than we usually assume …from bones marked in what some scholars interpret as prime numbers, to cave art paired with symbols that may have tracked animal cycles like an early

Michael (@MichaelButtonX) reflects on the Bronze Age collapse…a moment when several major civilizations fell within decades. The standard explanation traces it to a small climatic shift that triggered drought, unrest, and cascading failures. That fragile chain reaction led him

Michael (@MichaelButtonX) discusses the “Silurian hypothesis”…the idea that if an advanced civilization existed millions of years ago, we might never know it. He wonders if something like that could still exist in another form today, maybe beneath the ocean, intersecting with

For years, the mainstream explanation was simple: the Lost Labyrinth existed, ancient writers weren't making it up, but now it's gone. Case closed. Then in 2008, the Mataha Expedition changed everything. @MichaelButtonX talks about Belgian researcher Louis de Cordier and his

Michael @MichaelButtonX talks about how ancient writers repeatedly documented a massive structure in Egypt - the Lost Labyrinth. Herodotus described it as surpassing anything the Greeks ever built, greater in grandeur than even the pyramids. Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, and Pliny

We know male populations dropped 95% across Africa, Asia, and Europe 5,000-7,000 years ago. Mass warfare. Genetic bottleneck. Archaeological evidence of slaughter. We also know the Green Sahara collapsed into desert around the same time - 4,000-3,000 BC. Matt and Michael

Genetic evidence shows a massive bottleneck 5,000-7,000 years ago. Male populations across Africa, Asia, and Europe dropped by 95%. Michael (@MichaelButtonX ) talks about archaeological sites from that period tell the story: mass graves. Hundreds of bodies. Not just killed -

Hueyatlaco wasn’t just old - it was inconvenient. Tools beneath 300,000-year-old ash… then the site was buried and shut down. Watch @MichaelButtonX break down the evidence.👇