Endless Forms Most Beautiful • episode "S1E3" • Wonders of Life

49:00

How many animals - including zebras, moose and stalk-eyes flies - assess their opponents' fighting prowess before making an attack that risks injury or death.

8/12 • Trials of Life • 1990 • Nature

47:24

The frozen poles are home to the planet's ultimate survivalists, including polar bears, penguins and Arctic wolves; their world is changing fast -- breaking apart under their feet -- and their resilience will be tested beyond the extreme.

S1E6 • Hostile Planet • 2019 • Nature

58:37

The endearing pangolin is a little-known scaly mammal. Found in Africa and Asia, these shy creatures have an unfortunate tagline - they are the most poached and illegally trafficked animals in the world. Based in Namibia, conservationist Maria Diekmann rescues and rehabilitates her local pangolins. In a bid to better understand the global issues they are facing, we follow Maria to Vietnam, Thailand and China into the very heart of the crisis, where demand for pangolin products is greatest. In what turns out to be an emotional journey, Maria joins forces with a Chinese megastar to build a campaign to bring awareness to the plight of an animal most people have never even heard of.

Natural World • 2018 • Nature

58:37

Professor David Scheel takes an octopus into his home to learn about its intelligence and the extraordinary relationship he and his daughter develop with the creature. Named Heidi, the octopus is seen unravelling puzzles, recognising individual humans and even watching TV with the family. The film also looks at the remarkable behaviour of other octopuses around the world, from those that can change their colour and texture in a split second to the octopus that carries around its own coconut shell to hide in.

Natural World • 2019 • Nature

53:32

Ancient footprints in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park reveal new evidence of Ice Age humans that walked the land alongside enormous ground sloths and mammoths—thousands of years earlier than archaeologists thought people were in the Americas.

NOVA PBS • 2022 • Nature

58:13

In this episode, Chris Packham tells the miraculous story of how plant life turned Earth from a barren rock into a vibrant green world. A four billion year saga of extraordinary highs and lows that almost wiped out all life on the planet. Four billion years ago Earth was predominantly a water world, lacking land masses, with plant life’s early ancestors trapped on the seabed. Everything changed when a giant asteroid bombardment smashed into the young planet’s crust triggering plate tectonics - Earth’s extraordinary land building force. As opportunities on land grew, plants faced an epic struggle to establish themselves in a world dominated by giant eight metre fungi, overcoming death and dehydration and eventually creating the life-giving substance that would allow them to prosper: soil. But just as they seemed set to triumph, evolving into the amazing biological machines that are trees, they became the victims of their own success. Giant swamp forests sprang up, locking up so much carbon dioxide, that global temperatures plummeted sending Earth into one of its most terrifying chapters yet.

S1E3 • Earth: One Planet, Many Lives • 2023 • Nature