Life on Earth: The Greatest Story Ever Told

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Over the course of nearly four decades, it appears from the photo of me in bed that I haven’t changed much. We use cookies to personalise content and ads, to provide social media features and to analyse our traffic.

During the next three years, the Beagle sailed down the east coast of South America, rounded Cape Horn and came north again up the coast of Chile. Sixth Impression, with very numerous fine full-page coloured photographs in the text; terracotta cloth, gilt back, a near fine copy in unclipped dustwrapper. They may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant adverts on other sites. Fine in fine dustjacket, protected by an archival quality, removable, transparent, inert jacket protector. Several special filming techniques were devised to obtain some of the footage of rare and elusive animals.The most successful shelled animals are the molluscs, of which there are some 80,000 different species. There are some one million classified species of insect, and two or three times as many that are yet to be labelled. To a surprising degree, nearly all the major events in this history can be told using living animals to represent the ancestral creatures which were the actual protagonists.

Water-living animals, such as fish, molluscs, sea urchins and corals, are much more promising candidates for preservation. 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. Attenborough's perceptive, dynamic approach to the evolution of millions of species of living organisms takes the reader on an unforgettable journey of discovery from the very first spark of life to the blue and green wonder we know today.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. The reptiles were the first vertebrates for whom internal fertilisation was essential, so they developed the watertight egg, which hatches fully formed young. By the end of this book it is difficult to say which is the more astonishing – the ingenuity with which individual species contrive a living, or the complexity of their interdependence on each other and on the habitations provided by our planet. Dr Henry Gee presents creatures from ‘gregarious’ bacteria populating the seas to duelling dinosaurs in the Triassic period, to magnificent mammals with the future in their grasp.

Attenborough presents an incredible history of nature, from the emergence of tiny one-celled organisms to apelike but upright man.This was problematical for some hunters, such as spiders and scorpions, who developed courtship rituals to ensure that the female didn't eat the male. 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. The penultimate instalment investigates the primates, whose defining characteristics are forward-facing eyes for judging distance, and gripping hands with which to grasp branches, manipulate food and groom one another. In this new edition, the author, with the help of zoologist Matthew Cobb, has added all the most up-to-date discoveries of ecology and biology, as well as a full-colour 64-page photography section. As in the TV series, there are Reithian principles running through the veins, arteries, xylem and phloem of Attenborough’s words: to inform, educate and entertain.

The evolution of single-celled creatures, from simple cyanophytes to more complex ciliates, and then from multi-celled sponges and jellyfish to the many variations of coral and its associated polyps, is discussed in detail. 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. The episode begins in the South American rainforest whose rich variety of life forms is used to illustrate the sheer number of different species. The coelacanth is shown as a fish with bony fins that could have developed into legs, and the lungfish is able to absorb gaseous oxygen.It then evolved shielded tentacles and the casings eventually enveloped the entire body: these creatures are the brachiopods. By the time he reaches the Colorado River bed, the geological strata are 2,000 million years old—yet there are no fossils. To illustrate the motion of bats' wings in flight, a slow-motion sequence was filmed in a wind tunnel. No one can say just how many species of animals there are in these greenhouse-humid dimly lit jungles.