Life on Earth: The Greatest Story Ever Told

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In 1832 a young Englishman, Charles Darwin, twenty-four years old and naturalist on HMS Beagle, a brig sent by the Admiralty in London on a surveying voyage round the world, came to such a forest outside Rio de Janeiro. In another 40 years, there will be scientists continuing to change the way we understand this living planet. The most suitable places for fossilisation are in seas and lakes where sedimentary deposits that will become sandstones and limestones are slowly accumulating.

Attenborough originally intended merely to get close enough to narrate a piece about the apes' use of the opposable thumb, but as he advanced on all fours toward the area where they were feeding, he suddenly found himself face to face with an adult female. The programmes also pioneered a style of presentation whereby David Attenborough would begin describing a certain species' behaviour in one location, before cutting to another to complete his illustration. There are some one million classified species of insect, and two or three times as many that are yet to be labelled.We see breathtaking images of the natural world every day, shared on social media for us to gasp at. There are over forty different species of parrot, over seventy different monkeys, three hundred hummingbirds and tens of thousands of butterflies. 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. 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. Of those that did, only a tiny proportion happen to lie in the rocks that outcrop on the surface of the ground today; and of these few, most will be eroded away and destroyed before they are discovered by fossil hunters.

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. Attenborough handles a goliath frog, the largest of the species, to demonstrate its characteristics. David Attenborough's unforgettable meeting with gorillas became an iconic moment for millions of television viewers. To access your ebook(s) after purchasing, you can download the free Glose app or read instantly on your browser by logging into Glose.

This text tells how life has evolved from the simple molecules of the primaeval soup into the complex plants and animals that now inhabit the Earth's lands and seas. In describing the consequences of this process it is only too easy to use a form of words that suggests that the animals themselves were striving to bring about change in a purposeful way – that fish wanted to climb on to dry land and to modify their fins into legs, that reptiles wished to fly, strove to change their scales into feathers and so ultimately became birds. Sixth Impression, with very numerous fine full-page coloured photographs in the text; terracotta cloth, gilt back, a near fine copy in unclipped dustwrapper.

Our subject would be not only natural history in the sense that those two words are normally used, but the history of nature. Hardback, ISBN A new, beautifully illustrated edition of David Attenborough's groundbreaking Life on Earth. So I have had the luck to find and film rare creatures that few outsiders have seen in the wild, and to gaze on some of the most marvellous spectacles that the wild places of the world have to offer – a tree full of displaying birds of paradise in New Guinea, giant lemurs leaping through the forest of Madagascar, the biggest lizards in the world prowling, like dragons, through the jungle of a tiny island in Indonesia. It made possible all sorts of marvellous explorations of new sounds which could then be made into music. However, the open ocean offers no such refuge, so there is safety in numbers—both hunters and hunted swim in shoals and have streamlined bodies for pursuit or escape.On land, where for the most part rocks are not built up by deposition but broken down by erosion, deposits such as sand dunes are only very rarely created and preserved. Spriggina fossil, leaf-like impression on sandstone, Ediacaran era (575 million years old), Australia. They may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant adverts on other sites. This, however, risks imposing an appearance of purpose on the animal kingdom that does not exist in reality. The British Vice-Governor of the Galapagos told Darwin that even within the archipelago, there was variety: the tortoises on each island were slightly different, so that it was possible to tell which island they came from.