Life on Earth: The Greatest Story Ever Told

Product Information

The others were supplanted by the monkeys and a primitive species that still exists is the smallest, the marmoset. The Kimberley Ranges of Western Australia are, in fact, the remnants of a coral reef and the ancient seabed. The green tree ants of south-east Asia are shown to display the most extraordinary co-operation when building their nests. Away from Madagascar, the only lemur relatives to have survived are nocturnal, such as the bushbaby, the potto and the loris. Only after I had watched them for some time did I notice, clasping a branch within the hedge, a chameleon, motionless except for its goggling eyes, which swivelled to follow every passing insect.

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. Since that time, the theory of natural selection has been debated and tested, refined, qualified and elaborated. Examples of primitive mammals that are still alive today include the treeshrew, the desman and the star-nosed mole. Meanwhile, a pack hunter, such as the hyena, has immense stamina and will eventually wear down its quarry, easing the kill.Those that survived were water-dwellers, and the bull Nile crocodile is the largest reptile alive today.

The reptiles were the first vertebrates for whom internal fertilisation was essential, so they developed the watertight egg, which hatches fully formed young. However, it is the fully boned species that were most successful, and spread from the oceans to rivers and lakes. Various methods of breeding are examined, including laying eggs in rivers, depositing them in other damp habitats for safety or, as with the Brazilian pipa, embedding them within the skin of the parent itself.Although the magnolia, for instance, contains male and female cells, pollination from another plant is preferable as it ensures greater variation and thus evolution. 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. Ideas about biodiversity and mass extinctions are now prominently included, and the revelation – now textbook – that birds are dinosaurs is front and centre, having been dismissed the first time round. This was well known during the nineteenth century because the pioneers used it in their flintlock guns.

The Times This is now the best book available about the huge changes in our planet and its living creatures, over the billions of years of the Earth’s existence . Somewhere in my parents’ photo albums there is a picture of me, aged seven or eight, lying in my bed, reading. Furthermore, animal hunting expeditions required a degree of co-operation to achieve a successful outcome.Two examples are the sifaka, which is a specialised jumper, and the indri, which has a well-developed voice. Its cover image of a Panamanian red-eyed tree frog, was taken by Attenborough himself, [9] became an instantly recognisable emblem of the series. Fossils have been found not only in Australia but in many other parts of the world, including the Avalon peninsula in northern Canada where a seabed thronged with all kinds of hitherto unknown organisms and dating from around 565 million years ago has been preserved with astounding perfection. 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.