Every year, five million people visit London's Natural History Museum to see its incredible collection, from extraordinary dinosaurs to giant whales, and rare fossils to space rocks said to be as old as the solar system itself. But only a fraction of the staggering 80 million items in the collection are on display. Here cameras capture some of these incredible specimens, revealing the unique and rare pieces too valuable to exhibit.
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Every year, five million people visit London's Natural History Museum to see its incredible collection, from extraordinary dinosaurs to giant whales, and rare fossils to space rocks said to be as old as the solar system itself. But only a fraction of the staggering 80 million items in the collection are on display. Here cameras capture some of these incredible specimens, revealing the unique and rare pieces too valuable to exhibit.
2020 • Nature
The museum's dinosaur experts Susie Maidment and Paul Barrett follow up an exciting tip-off about some possible dino footprints in Wales. Meanwhile, the world's most famous dinosaur - Dippy the Diplodocus - is on a road trip around the country and needs an up-close inspection to make sure it's safe.
2020 • Nature
World-leading dinosaur expert Susie Maidment is in the museum basement trying to piece together the skeleton of the first Tyrannosaurus rex ever discovered. It's a priceless specimen but somehow the bones have got muddled up with another dinosaur and it's up to Susie to work out if any of the bits are missing. The experts inspect Guy the gorilla, who was a London Zoo favourite for decades and now sits fully preserved in his own glass case, and the museum launches an ambitious project to capture a sample of every living bug in the UK today.
2021 • Nature
Leading experts examine a rock in a crate of finds from an archaeological dig in Africa, which could contain a very rare 200-million-year-old dinosaur skull. The museum staff prepares for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards. Other artefacts from the museum featured in this episode include meteorite fragments that are older than the solar system and the oldest complete beetle specimens ever found in the UK.
2021 • Nature
In southern Africa, a pride of lions has rewritten the rules - by learning to take down elephants. In this follow up to Africa's Giant Killers, we join the pride at the start of the rainy season. As the elephants depart, a catalogue of dramatic events unfolds. The pride males turn against each other, an inexperienced mum puts her new born cubs in mortal danger, a rival group of lions challenge the pride for its territory and, when lightning strikes, fires burn day and night. When the dust eventually settles, the pride is left with only one choice - to face their old foe the elephants or risk starvation. The final showdown awaits.
Natural World • 2015 • Nature
Fortey is on Hawaii to investigate how life colonises a newly-born island. The most remote island group in the world, by some estimates only one new species successfully colonised Hawaii every 35,000 years - yet the Hawaiian Islands teem with a great diversity of life. In search of the evolutionary secrets of how one species becomes many, Fortey encounters beautiful honeycreeper birds whose evolution rivals that of the Darwin's famous finches; carnivorous caterpillars who now can't eat leaves; and giant silversword plants that thrive in parched volcanic soil at 10,000 feet.
Part 1 • Nature's Wonderlands: Islands of Evolution • 2016 • Nature
In the heart of the Atlantic, Gordon Buchanan joins a team looking to discover why huge numbers of devil rays, fish with 'wings' nearly four metres across, and gather every summer near the Azores archipelago. In northeast Turkey the on-board cameras are carried by brown bears as part of a study trying to understand why so many bears survive in a small patch of forest. In southern France on-board cameras help scientists trying to prove that guard dogs can help protect sheep flocks from wolf attacks. The night-vision cameras show how the dogs work together as a team to fend off the wolves.
S1E3 • Animals with Cameras • 2018 • Nature
First prog in series about fossils. David Attenborough travels in UK, Dominican Republic, West Germany & USA in search of fossils, & the palaeontological techniques to find and reveal them.
S1E1 • Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives • 1989 • Nature
As the waters of the Amazon and its tributaries reach their lowest, torrential rain begins to beat down with brutal force. In a few months’ time, the forest will be submerged under almost thirty meters of water: enough to swallow up a ten-storey building! The youngest animals are dealing with the deluge for the first time in their lives. We follow them all: the sloth, terribly vulnerable; the opossum, the only marsupial outside Oceania; the harpy eagle, one of the greatest in the world; the shy, solitary armadillo; the squirrel monkey, a treetop acrobat… and many other inhabitants of a gleaming, transfigured world shown in this way for the first time. This documentary tells their tale: a story of competition and dangers, unease and courage; a story that will inspire every viewer and remain engraved in their memory for a long, long time...
2016 • Nature
Simon Reeve travels through wilderness of Patagonia, at the foot of the South American continent. A beautiful and rugged land of mountains, ice and endless wild grasslands, Patagonia is whipped by wind, rain, and snow. Simon's journey takes him up to the huge south Patagonian ice field, through the foothills of the Andes towards the great Grey Glacier of eastern Chile - coming face to face with pumas and riding with gauchos.
S1E2 • Wilderness with Simon Reeve • 2024 • Nature