Word: attenborough
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Like life, the series begins slowly. Attenborough ventures back to the planet's earliest days, some 3 billion or so years ago. DNA molecules lead to bacteria, which in turn are transformed into protozoans. Over hundreds of millions of years, the oceans begin to swarm with increasingly complicated forms of life. The records from those days are scanty at best, and, to the layman, one fossil looks much like another. There may be books in running brooks and sermons in stones, but they do not translate very well into...
Suddenly, however, somewhere in the third episode, the series takes off, and not for another second does it falter or flag The reason: at this point Attenborough has reached the place in his story where life can actually be photographed. Many of the creatures he now begins to talk about-the crocodiles, for example-have let evolution pass them by and have remained the same through the eons...
...even the beings that have become extinct usually have approximate, living counterparts that Attenborough and his camera crews can pursue, as they snoop, like scientific paparazzi, on the private lives of all creatures great and small. Probably never has any program shown so many forms of courtship and copulation: millipedes writhing in combinations too complicated to comprehend, goggle-eyed newts climbing atop each other, fish defying the hazards of nature to bring sperm to egg, frogs singing hoarse epithalamiums in ponds and swamps. Only fast-flying swifts, which mate on the wing, seem able to escape the prying lens...
...wastes. After a rainstorm, they gorge themselves on insects, mate, then watch their eggs quickly develop into tadpoles. Finally, bloated with water, they burrow into the sand and wait for the next storm, which may not come for many months. In one of the series' most fascinating sequences, Attenborough digs up a piece of the desert and drops it into a container of water. The dirt turns to mud, then dissolves, and a single Cyclorana emerges-looking, doubtless, for a mate...
There seems to be no place that Attenborough's camera has not gone: to all seven continents and the seas that separate them, into the air and deep under the water. One coup was capturing on film a living coelacanth, a fish once thought to lave died out 70 million years ago. With a brief foreword by Attenborough, whose unpretentiousness has an eloquence all its own, the footage of an extremely ugly fish Becomes oddly moving. The coelacanth has limblike fins, and it is likely that one of its ancestors was the first to climb onto he land...