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Life on Earth: The Greatest Story Ever Told

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As a University of Chicago graduate student in 1952, Stanley Miller performed a famous experiment with Harold Urey, a Nobel laureate in chemistry. Their results explored the idea that life formed in a primordial soup. But Attenborough needed some way to organize the material, and this one did just fine. In any case, science isn't the focus of these programs. Attenborough does not, for example, give us a good explanation of the mechanism of evolution. He gives us the Attenborough trademark: beautiful images of animals and plants, along with thoughtful narration in his sonorous voice.

Quoting Jenkins: "230 million years ago. One or more groups of reptiles evolve into dinosaurs. They range from bird-like animals a few inches tall to giants more than 90 feet long. They live in the sea, on the land, and in the air. Dinosaurs will be the dominant animals on the earth for the next 160 million years." It was the tendency of bacteria to form communities of different species that led to the next great evolutionary innovation. Bacteria took group living to the next level—the nucleated cell.

In 2019, a team of researchers in France and Italy reported finding extraterrestrial organic material preserved in the 3.3 billion-year-old sediments of Barberton, South Africa. The team suggested micrometeorites as the material’s likely source. Further such evidence came in 2022 from samples of asteroid Ryugu returned to Earth by Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission. The count of amino acids found in the Ryugu samples now exceeds 20 different types. What is chirality and why is it biologically important? a b Richards, M. (2013). "Global Nature, Global Brand: BBC Earth and David Attenborough's Landmark Wildlife Series". 146 (1): 143–154. doi: 10.1177/1329878X1314600118. {{ cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= ( help) An updated version of the book originally released with the documentary series, "Life on Earth", the book gives a splendid overview of the various multicellular lifeforms we know about. Each chapter covers a specific living kingdom (animal or plant) but has been updated with the latest scientific information about them. David Attenborough seems to have come up against a similar problem, and has solved it by creating his nature documentaries. Don’t try to explain or to analyze natural beauty; just film and enjoy. His voiceovers are typically not analytical, but explanatory; they help you understand what you’re looking at. Attenborough mainly does this through narration. He turns a natural scene into a story, with its own tragedies, comedies, and romances. Some even experimented with multicellular life, such as the 1,200-million-year-old seaweed Bangiomorpha26 and the approximately 900-million-year-old fungus Ourasphaira.27 But there were stranger things. The earliest known signs of multicellular life are 2,100 million years old. Some of these creatures are as large as twelve centimeters across, so hardly microscopic, but they are so strange in form to our modern eyes that their relationship with algae, fungi, or other organisms is obscure.28 They could have been some form of colonial bacteria, but we cannot discount the possibility that there once lived entire categories of living organisms—bacterial, eukaryote, or something entirely other—that died out without leaving any descendants and that we should therefore find hard to comprehend.

It’s just so interesting. I really enjoy stuff like geography and the natural world so learning about stuff like this is fascinating to me. I really liked the way the sections were broken down as well, focusing on each “type” of environment as a whole – not even region specific, there are areas with the same or very similar environmental parameters and factors that stretch across the globe and many of those different locations have species that are very similar, sometimes the only real difference being the name they’re known by. In other places, plants and animals have evolved very specifically to suit their exact location, this seems especially true when that location is isolated, such as islands in the middle of the Indian or Pacific Oceans. An example is species of birds on some of these islands who, because of their remoteness, face no predators and so over the years, have lost their ability to fly simply because they do not need to anymore. The island provides everything they need to thrive and they have no need to leave it, nor any threats to fly away from.The first rumbles of an oncoming storm came from the rifting and breakup of a supercontinent, Rodinia. This included every significant landmass at the time.29 One consequence of the breakup was a series of ice ages that covered the entire globe, the like of which had not been seen since the Great Oxidation Event. But life responded once again by rising to the challenge. Somewhere in my parents’ photo albums there is a picture of me, aged seven or eight, lying in my bed, reading. On the wall, there are postcards from holidays, a poster of space pirate Han Solo crouching above a fictional snow lizard called a Tauntaun, and a picture of an equally alien but very real cephalopod, a nautilus, a mollusc with a pin-hole eye and tentacular cirri projecting from its tiger-striped shell. It was cut out from the second copy of Life on Earth that my father had acquired, the book that accompanied the BBC series by David Attenborough. The first was for reading, the second, bought cheap without a dust cover, was for the photos.

It’s not simply that we have observed more of nature with ever increasingly sophisticated technology. 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. Huggan, G. (2013). "A is for Attenborough". Nature's Saviours: Celebrity Conservationists in the Television Age. Routledge. p.31. ISBN 9780415519144. In said quote alone, it's claimed that dinos are paraphyletic (They're not), that marine reptiles & pterosaurs are dinos (They're not), & that 230 - 160 = 65 (It doesn't).A Life in the Trees" looks at the primates and related groups. it starts with the Borneo tree shrew who may resemble the early primates. A look at the prosimians is then given, made up of the lemurs of Madagascar and the tarsiers of South East Asia. The primate family is then looked at, divided into the New World monkeys with their prehensile tails, the tree living ones from the Old World and finally the ground dwelling primates like the gorillas and chimpanzees that are most like us. Attenborough recounts the history of the natural world, „from the emergence of tiny one-celled organisms in the primeval slime more than 3,000 million years ago to apelike but upright man, equally well adapted to life in the rain forest of New Guinea and the glass canyons of a modern metropolis.“

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