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Maybe fish had developed muscular fins and crawled on to land to become amphibians; maybe amphibians in their turn had developed watertight skins and become reptiles; maybe, even, some ape-like creatures had stood upright and become the ancestors of man.
In a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes drawn up by the British Film Institute in 2000, voted for by industry professionals, Life on Earth was placed 32nd. Various methods of breeding are examined, including laying eggs in rivers, depositing them in other damp habitats for safety or, as with the Brazilian pipa, embedding them within the skin of the parent itself.
Life on Earth: A Natural History by David Attenborough is a British television natural history series made by the BBC in association with Warner Bros. As in the TV series, there are Reithian principles running through the veins, arteries, xylem and phloem of Attenborough’s words: to inform, educate and entertain. However, it had claws on its wings and there is only one species alive today that does so: the hoatzin, whose chicks possess them for about a week or so. In this new edition, the author, with the help of zoologist Matthew Cobb, has added all the most up-to-date discoveries of ecology and biology, as well as a full-colour 64-page photography section.
If there is any criticism to be made about the science of the book, it is that it doesn’t quite represent life on Earth in all its diversity as we understand it today. The fossilised remains of jellyfish are shown within the Flinders Ranges of Australia, and are estimated to be 652 million years old.To illustrate the motion of bats' wings in flight, a slow-motion sequence was filmed in a wind tunnel.