Life on Earth: The Greatest Story Ever Told

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The evolution of shelled creatures is demonstrated with the flatworm, which eventually changed its body shape when burrowing became a necessity for either food or safety. In the spaces between them, the black water rippled with fish, and over the leaves walked a chestnut-coloured bird, lifting its long-toed feet with the exaggerated care of a man in snowshoes.

I intend no minimisation of the debt owed to them by all of us who take pleasure in watching and thinking about animals.Over the course of nearly four decades, it appears from the photo of me in bed that I haven’t changed much. A new, fully updated narrative edition of David Attenborough’s seminal biography of our world, The Living Planet. They are not as restricted as their amphibian ancestors, since they can survive in the hottest climates.

The difficulty will be to find specialists who know enough about the groups concerned to be able to single out the new one. Initially, the films we made tried to document the lives of particular animals showing how each found its food, defended itself and courted, and the ways in which it fitted into the community of animals and plants around it. The dark fine-grained rocks lie not in horizontal layers like all those above, but are twisted and buckled and riven with veins of pink granite. He states, "The placenta and the womb between them provide a degree of safety and a continuity of sustenance which is unparalleled in the animal world. To illustrate the motion of bats' wings in flight, a slow-motion sequence was filmed in a wind tunnel.The series is available in the UK for Regions 2 and 4 as a four-disc DVD set (BBCDVD1233, released 1 September 2003) and as part of The Life Collection. Are signs of life absent because these rocks and the limestones directly above are so extremely ancient that all such traces have been crushed from them? Maybe, thousands of years ago, birds and reptiles from continental South America had reached the Galapagos, unintentional passengers on the rafts of vegetation that float down the rivers and out to sea. Another built a replica of a mole rat burrow in a horizontally mounted wheel, so that as the mole rat ran along the tunnel, the wheel could be spun to keep the animal adjacent to the camera.

These developed into trilobites and crustaceans, and the horseshoe crab is shown nesting in vast numbers on Delaware Bay. To adapt to these environments, they had by now acquired gills for breathing, a lateral line to detect movement and a swim bladder to aid buoyancy. His distinguished career spans more than sixty years, and his extraordinary contribution to natural history broadcasting and film-making has brought him international recognition, from Life on Earth to Frozen Planet, Planet Earth to Blue Planet. These adaptations can be truly extraordinary: fish that walk or lay eggs on leaves in mid-air; snakes that fly; flightless birds that graze like deer; and bears that grow hair on the soles of their feet. He subsequently discovered, to his chagrin, that only a few seconds had been recorded: the cameraman was running low on film and wanted to save it for the planned description of the opposable thumb.

From that first foray to the spread of early hominids who later became Homo sapiens, life has persisted, undaunted. The book is as new with a small colour mark and ink mark on the outer edges of the pages,two small nicks on the edges of the pages. million), it was an immense project that involved filming over 100 locations around the world and took three years in the making by a team of 30 people with the help of more than 500 scientists. To underline this distinction each time with a phrase like ‘ancestral forms that closely resemble the living species’ would be unnecessarily clumsy and literal-minded, but that qualifying phrase must be taken as read whenever I have referred to an ancient creature by the name of a living one.