Life On Earth: A Natural History

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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. And how fantastic are these images! We see slow-motion shots of bees flapping their wings; we see colorful bacteria floating around in fluid. We see birds of paradise doing their mating dance, and brightly-colored fish darting through the great barrier reef. We swim with dolphins and fly with bats, we spy on moles crawling through tunnels and watch tadpoles developing into frogs. The sounds are no less impressive than the sights. In addition to the calls of birds, the croaks of frogs, the songs of whales, and the howls of monkeys, is the orchestral accompaniment. I don’t know how they make music for these things, but the music in this documentary was always excellent. It matches the mood of the footage and is timed to dance along with the images. 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.

Even though the documentary is not heavy on science, I did learn a few things. It seems no matter how many of these documentaries I see, I always learn about a new species. Did you know that lungfish live in ponds in Africa and dig down into the mud to stay there during the whole dry season? And did you know about Caecilians? They are a group of amphibians, related to salamanders, who have lost their legs and which now look like giant earth worms. Life is many things, but it is certainly never dull. David Attenborough’s unforgettable meeting with gorillas became an iconic moment for millions of television viewers. Life on Earth, the series and accompanying book, fundamentally changed the way we view and interact with the natural world setting a new benchmark of quality, influencing a generation of nature lovers. 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.Building Bodies" looks at the first animals to appear in the ocean. These can be divided into three groups: the shelled animals, animals with radial symmetry and those with segmented bodies but all came from a common ancestor. One of the descendants of that common ancestor developed a shell and became the molluscs which branched out into snails, bivalves, swimming nautilus, cuttlefish and the octopus. Another is the crinoids, which developed a radially symmetrical body around the centre. Some developed a five fold symmetry, leading to the starfishes and other echinoderms. The third started with a segmented body, leading to the worms and other creatures with an external shell like the famous trilobites, other creatures as revealed in the Burgess shale as well as the crabs, lobsters and shrimps. I'm giving it a three because sometimes the text can be incredibly dry and it's often disorienting how Attenborough starts out talking about one animal before flowing into another, or six, sometimes leaving you a little disoriented. The paragraphs are also incredibly long and dense, which makes this book feel more like a textbook and less accessible than his shows/movies. The pictures are lovely and break up the text in a nice way and part of me wishes there were more of them, even though I understand that full color pictures ramp up the costs of the book and sporadic insertion means less money.

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. Told through an examination of animal and plant life, this is an astonishing celebration of the evolution of life on earth, with a cast of characters drawn from the whole range of organisms that have ever lived on this planet. 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.Much like any review of a book by Sir David Attenborough, I shall begin this, too, with declaring my love for this man. Ever since I was a little girl he taught me about plants and animals and showed me the wonders of this amazing planet. Then as now, he did so in a charming manner, delivering facts in a way any layman can understand. But he also did it with great passion that, at least in my case, was infectuous. King bird of paradise ( Cicinnurus regius), Papua New Guinea. Photograph: Tim Laman/National Geographic 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.