Life On Earth: A Natural History

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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! 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. 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. 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. 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.However, in showing the different types of species that have evolved, the book also takes us on a journey through time, showing us animals that have barely needed to evolve at all as well as ones that are highly specialized. We thus see the differences that have proven successful throughout evolution (explaining natural selection and other processes) depending on where in the world you are (Australia's maruspials being the most well-known example). This also goes for plants (which many never even think about) - be it trees, shrubs, lichen, moss or flowers. 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. 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. Over the course of nearly four decades, it appears from the photo of me in bed that I haven’t changed much. I have dedicated my life to studying and talking in awe about evolution. Last year, I recorded my daughter commentating over Blue Planet II, and posted it online; it became a minor internet phenomenon. I know Attenborough saw this video, and I hope he knows that the continuity of his work is transgenerational. In another 40 years, there will be scientists continuing to change the way we understand this living planet. Stare at those pictures, wonder at how those beasts evolved. I have little doubt that one of your daughters will cite Attenborough as her inspiration, too.

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. King bird of paradise ( Cicinnurus regius), Papua New Guinea. Photograph: Tim Laman/National Geographic While he ends the journey with us, Attenborough also shows us so much about the natural world, and what becomes so clear is how we are all interconnected. Humans might be the most successful life form in terms of our colonisation of the planet, we are not the master species, and there's so much that keeps us connected to the other animals, insects, and flora around us. Though some parts of the book felt less interesting than others, and that most of the general history phrases and terms from the book were things we already knew or learned in middle school biology, I still really really enjoyed listening to this book. The flow was nice and extensive enough without being too surface-level or boring. Attenborough's narration and writing style is very factual but also gives a sense of intrigue. He tells the readers about behaviorisms in different species, social skills, intelligence and cooperation (yes, also amongst plants).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. 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. 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.

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. Definitely, a classic story of life on earth, what I really enjoyed was how David Attenborough kept his views based strictly on science, avoiding any references to religious interpretations of life on earth. Life began on earth based on a unique combination of an environment with time. Did someone create this wonderful set of occurrences or was it by chance? DA avoids this question as there can be no scientific explanation but instead leaves the question open to its readers. But one question has been answered, the human being is in no way special or above any other animals or insects. DA attributes the rise of the humanoids to the power of communications, making it the most effective way of controlling the resources and all other animals. But he also points out that in the long history of the earth there were other animals which were far more efficient in controlling the environments till the environment changed. 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. There is much more detail in the book than on our screens. For odd, historical reasons, the BBC keeps natural history and science in separate silos, as if displaying the scientific fact of evolution can only be represented in the glory of nature. But make no mistake, this is a science book. 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.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. 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.

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. 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. 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.“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).