Life on Earth: The Greatest Story Ever Told

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Delve into the astonishing story of the evolution of myriad animals and plants that have evolved on our planet - and those that are now endangered by a vast range of issues.

Nowadays, we are somewhat inured to the spectacle of wildlife photography, largely because of Attenborough himself, and the tireless work of his camera crews, photographers and field scientists. Birds communicate through display and/or song, and the elaborate courtship rituals of New Guinea's birds-of-paradise are shown. No one can say just how many species of animals there are in these greenhouse-humid dimly lit jungles. Credit should be given to Matthew Cobb, who has helped Attenborough with contemporary thinking on matters such as the intense integration of genetics into evolutionary biology – a result of our ability to read genomes with ease and speed. In 1999 viewers of Channel 4 voting for the 100 Greatest TV Moments placed the gorilla sequence at number 12—ranking it ahead of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation and the wedding of Charles and Diana.Each chapter is devoted to the history of the major groups of animals - insects, reptiles, birds, mammals - and each chapter gives a history of their nature rather than a conventional natural history.

Their acute sense of vision led to them standing erect to spot predators, leaving their hands free to bear weapons.

In 1969, bones of creatures such as a 3-metre-tall kangaroo and a ferocious marsupial lion were found in a cave in Naracoorte, South Australia. There are over forty different species of parrot, over seventy different monkeys, three hundred hummingbirds and tens of thousands of butterflies. Lastly, I have made no reference by name to those many scientists whose work has provided the facts and theories on which the following pages are based.

Life’s evolutionary steps – from the development of a digestive system to the awe of creatures taking to the skies in flight – are conveyed with an up-close intimacy. The final episode deals with the evolution of the most widespread and dominant species on Earth: humans.

So if the proportion of the secondary element to the primary one in a rock is measured, the time at which the original mineral was formed can be calculated. Here on the islands, where there was little vegetation, one species fed on seaweed and clung to rocks among the surging waves with unusually long and powerful claws. They may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant adverts on other sites. The others were supplanted by the monkeys and a primitive species that still exists is the smallest, the marmoset.

Attenborough asks why these have become so varied and tries to discover the common theme that links them.Today, however, it is possible to establish genetic identity of a species in a few hours using a piece of apparatus no bigger than a mobile phone. Nearly a century after the publication of Darwin’s book on evolution by natural selection, On the Origin of Species, Crick and Watson described the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid – DNA for short – the molecule that carries the genetic blueprint from which another individual animal can be developed.