The Best of David Attenborough Episode 1: David Attenborough’s First Life

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The Best of David Attenborough Episode 1: David Attenborough’s First Life

In more than fifty years of broadcasting, Sir David Attenborough has travelled the globe to document the living world in all its wonder. Now, in the landmark series First Life, he goes back in time in sear
ch of the very first animals.

David Attenborough’s First Life is told with stunning photography, state of the art visual effects and the captivating charm of the world’s favourite naturalist.

David Attenborough's First Life - The Origin of Life (Documentary)
E01: Arrival 
David Attenborough 1
David Attenborough (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Attenborough’s journey begins close to his childhood home in Leicestershire, where the discovery of a 560 million year old fossil transformed our understanding of the origins of life. From here he travels back to a period when the Earth was dominated by single celled bacteria, and investigates clues of a global event that was to change the history of life on Earth: Snowball Earth.
In a very different setting, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, a 600 million year old animal demonstrates how the atmospheric changes triggered by this global glaciation allowed cells to stick together and eventually form the first complex multi-cellular organisms. Attenborough travels to remote fossil sites in Newfoundland’s Mistaken Point and Australia’s Ediacara Hills to explore how some animals faded away as evolutionary experiments but others developed crucial features which laid the foundations for animal life today. 550 million years ago, animals developed the first bilateral (mirror-image) body plan, evolved sexual reproduction and began to move for the first time.
- See more at: http://firstlifeseries.com/about/#sthash.xyX6UN0x.dpuf



David Attenborough's First Life - The Origin of Life (Documentary)
E02: Conquest

David Attenborough
David Attenborough
(Photo credit: @JonKing)
The foundations for animal life had now been laid down, and following the appearance of mouths and mobility, evolution took off. Attenborough explores the Burgess Shale in Canada’s Rocky Mountains, where there is fossil evidence of an event 542 million years ago which saw animals increase in number, diversity and size as never before. These ancient rocks reveal the world’s first large predator, the first defences and the emergence of an animal group that would conquer the oceans: the hard-shelled arthropods.

With bodies completely covered in a hard skeleton, arthropods resisted predation and diversified beyond comparison. Attenborough examines fossils from the deserts of Morocco and beaches of Scotland which document how this group would proliferate to conquer the oceans and make the pioneering first steps onto land. Some grew large and ponderous, and others developed wings and took to the air for the first time.
- See more at: http://firstlifeseries.com/about/#sthash.xyX6UN0x.dpuf

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