What is Bedrock?

This podcast explores the first 90% of Earth’s history, a time known as the Precambrian Era.

Before humans, before dinosaurs, before fish… there was the Precambrian.

The ancient Earth was an incredibly alien world, but certainly not a dead one. The Precambrian was a time of beginnings: the first continents and oceans, the violent birth of the moon and life’s first fossils. There were cataclysmic events that seemed set to destroy Earth: planetary collisions and global glaciations which instead forged the world we know today.

This podcast starts at the beginning of Earth history, working forward through time. Along the way, you will build a mental toolkit to see the world like a geologist. You will never look at a mountain, the moon, or pond scum in quite the same way again.

Welcome to Bedrock.

Dylan Wilmeth is the writer and host of Bedrock. He is a geology professor at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has a PhD from the University of Southern California, and worked four years as a researcher in France. He specializes in stromatolites (fossil pond scum), looking for evidence of early oxygen and life. In this search, he has examined Precambrian rocks and fossils across four continents.

About Images and Audio

Images: All images on this website are sourced from 1) Wikimedia Commons under open-access Creative Commons Licenses, 2) rarely, academic publications, not distributed for profit, 3) personal photographs.

Audio: All music and other audio on this website is sourced from 1) personal recordings for my own voice, 2) paid licenses from PremiumBeat, or 3) Wikimedia Commons under open-access Creative Commons Licenses.

Early episode transcripts list visual and audio references in detail, later ones don’t, but I’m always happy to share references.