Rise of Animals: Triumph of the vertebrates

Blackleaf

Hall of Fame Member
Oct 9, 2004
48,340
1,650
113
The new documentary by natural history legend Sir David Attenborough starts tonight on BBC2.

In Rise of Animals: Triumph of the vertebrates the naturalist explores the origins of the backbone by studying a tiny prehistoric animal and a living fossil living in the south of England.

Sir David takes a 500-million-year evolutionary journey to study animals including a newly discovered ‘missing link’ from China, a shallow water predator that swam like a fish but took its first steps on land, giant ancient animals and the famous fossil of the feathered dinosaur.


Sir David sets out to investigate how vertebrates managed to step out of the water for the first time and his search takes him to see fossils in the Canadian Arctic, revealing an amazing creature called Tiktaalik (a CGI image is pictured)


Sir David looks at the story of mammals in the Lufeng Basin of Southern China where he examines a tiny 195-million-year-old fossil of a Hadrocodium skull measuring just one centimeter belonging to one of earliest mammals discovered. A mocked-up skeleton of a Hadrocodium is pictured


The series, which will air at 9pm tonight on BBC 2, uses CGI animation to bring long-dead creatures to life and tells the story of how a wide array of animals, including fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals came to flourish.

It sees Sir David filming for the first time in China, where he sees the fossils that are changing the face of palaeontology, as well as travelling to remote locations across the globe to unravel the mysterious origins of vertebrates, chart their unexpected journey out of the water and reveal the rise of mammals.


David Attenborough has visited new paleontological hotspots, including Lufeng Dinosaur National Geopark (pictured) to fill in evolutionary gaps of how vertebrates came to rule the Earth and how their evolution defines our own human bodies, in a new two-part documentary