Life On Earth: A Natural History

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This quality of natural beauty is why I find it so rewarding. The pleasure is almost spiritual. You can experience beauty without thinking about your ego or anybody else’s. There is no moral to be learned, no theme to unravel, no joke to get, no political message. But the downside is that I don’t know how to react, how to express my appreciation. I can, for example, write a review of a book or a documentary. But this would be absurd to do with a tree or an animal. The best most of us can do is to mutter "How lovely!" under our breaths and then lapse into a respectful silence. If you’re familiar with the work of David Attenborough then you know roughly what to expect here. This is basically the great naturalist’s narrative on how life on earth came about, and it’s thoroughly fascinating if you’re interested in animals – although also occasionally intimidating as well. Not what I expected—which happens when you forgo reading the blurb. Not sure what I was thinking. But I didn‘t get this audiobook for the story, I got it to listen to him. David Attenborough can tell me anything and I would listen. The man is an international treasure. I love him, probably like many other people growing up on his TV documentaries about nature. In retrospect I would probably have enjoyed this more with moving pictures on a TV screen though. As in: a re-watch of his „Life“ series! Credit should be given to Matthew Cobb, who has helped Attenborough with contemporary thinking on matters such as the intense integration of genetics into evolutionary biology – a result of our ability to read genomes with ease and speed. This technology was effectively nonexistent in 1979, but is now universal, and has categorically reinforced and refined our knowledge of evolution. Moreover, he makes sure nobody forgets that any place on Earth is special and that we should look closer at the natural world around us to really appreciate and protect it.

He tells the readers about behaviorisms in different species, social skills, intelligence and cooperation (yes, also amongst plants). This book, as you can see in the pictures above, is an updated version of an older one Sir Attenborough published many years ago. And yes, I also have all the DVD boxes. The Life series focuses on the different aspects of life (duh) - mammals, birds, plants, fish etc. Theme and Variation" looks at some of the ways mammals have developed and evolved after the ending of the age of dinosaurs. The earliest mammals were probably tiny insectivores like the shrews and moles. From would also rise more specialised insectivores like the pangolin, the armadillo and anteaters. Gliding mammals like the colugo hint at how the bats came to fly. The bats would become very successful and branch out from insects to other sources of food like nectar, fruits and blood (the vampire bat). In the water, the whales and dolphins would develop, become some of the biggest and fastest marine animals. 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. In this context, of course, Sir Attenborough also talks about slightly more special places on this planet such as New Zealand or Galápagos, telling us of how important these places were historically in shaping our modern understanding of the natural world.The Invasion of the Land" starts with looking at the mudskipper and what it can tell us about how fish move and breath out of water. Looking at the coelacanth and the lungfish give a better idea of how the ancestors of the first land creatures, the amphibians, looked like. Some would become salamanders. Some salamanders have reverted to mainly water living forms (like the axolotl). Another group of amphibians would burrow into the ground, becoming the caecilians. One other group would become the frogs and toads and develop various ways to minimise their dependence on water, especially for breeding. The First Forests" looks at, as the title implies, the first forests that rose on land. They were not spectacular, covering only the shores and consisting of plants like moss and liverworts. Into them can the first herbivores, the millipedes, followed by carnivores like centipedes, scorpions and spiders (and also amphibians). As plants got the ability to grow taller, to compete for light, and developed roots to search for water, they began to move inland. These are the early ferns and horsetails. Insects that could climb and fly, like bristletails and dragonflies, lived in these new forests. Other plants like cycads and conifers also appeared that broke the dependence on water for reproduction. Other flying insects, like beetles, bees, butterflies and flies followed the dragonflies into the air. This lead to the development of flowers, whose plants would make use of these insects to pollinate them. This relationships would become so successful that some plants would come to depend on specific insects for pollination and some insects would come to depend on certain plants to nourish their young. An old book, but if you're itching to hear David Attenborough's voice in your head while you read about sea cucumbers and ancient millipedes as long as cows, then this is your book. This book is amazing. The history of all life on Earth is so incredibly vast, and yet Attenborough manages to explore it in a way that doesn't feel like it's leaving stuff out, but also doesn't feel like it's going over our heads. I don't know how he does it.

Life on Earth was his first program. Nowadays, David Attenborough is such a household name, and his influence on nature documentaries is so widespread, that it made the experience of seeing the young Attenborough a bit jarring. He looks spry, even sprightly. He snorkels, scuba dives, crawls through a cave, holds animals in his own hands, and tries to cut an antelope carcass with a stone tool. He’s slowed down a lot since then. But in all other respects he was and remains the same. 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. 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.Naturally, you have a better chance of getting a complete impression when watching countless DVDs with hundreds of hours of footage than when reading a book with a few photographs in it. Nevertheless, this book manages to vividly convey the astonishingly colourful displays of amphibians and birds, the raw strength of hunting mammals (especially big cats), the breathtaking grace of whales and sharks and other sea creatures, as well as the quirkiness of insects and the silent beauty of plants (even if they don't bloom).