'Living Fossils' Aren't Really a Thing

Try CuriosityStream today: http://curiositystream.com/eons Viewers like you help make PBS (Thank you ?) . Support your local PBS Member Station here: https://to.pbs.org/DonateEONS Crocodiles, horseshoe crabs and tuatara are animals that have persisted for millions of years, said to have gone unchanged since the days of the dinosaurs. But even the most ancient-looking organisms show us that evolution is always at work. Special thanks to Nobumichi Tamura for allowing us to use his paleoart. Check out his portfolio here: http://spinops.blogspot.com Thanks to Nathan E. Rogers and Studio 252mya for their illustrations. You can find more of their work here: https://252mya.com/gallery/nathan-e-rogers Produced in collaboration with PBS Digital Studios: http://youtube.com/pbsdigitalstudios Want to follow Eons elsewhere on the internet? Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/eonsshow Twitter - https://twitter.com/eonsshow Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/eonsshow/ References: http://www.nature.com/news/oldest-homo-sapiens-fossil-claim-rewrites-our-species-history-1.22114 http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v546/n7657/full/nature22336.html http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080327/full/news.2008.695.html http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168952508000036?via%3Dihub http://www.cell.com/trends/genetics/fulltext/S0168-9525(08)00003-6?_returnURL=http%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0168952508000036%3Fshowall%3Dtrue http://www.jstor.org/stable/2396218?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents http://sp.lyellcollection.org/content/379/1/525.short http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0044985 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1558-5646.2011.01373.x/full https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-2012-13-1-415