Super Senses • 2024 • episode "S1E1" • The Secret Genius of Plants

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

51:30

How do you decide nature's weirdest animal? Is it the sloth that hangs upside down and moves so slowly that moss grows in its fur? Is it a sea pen that sits rooted to the seabed in endless darkness and emitting its own glow?

2021 • Nature

50:46

This documentary follows a spectacular pioneering story of nature preservation. Engadin was created 100 years ago and the wildlife left without human interference to re-populate the Alps first nature reserve. Now ibex, lynx and wolves are thriving in this pristine area.

2015 • Nature

59:06

This episode reveals how mammals developed from tiny nocturnal forest dwellers to the dominant form of life on the planet following the death of the dinosaurs. David explains how the meteoric rise of mammals led to an astounding diversity of life and laid the foundations for the ascent of man.

Part 2 • Rise of Animals: Triumph of the Vertebrates • 2013 • Nature

36:19

Like most big cats, the leopard is a master of secrecy. It's one of the hardest of all big cats to see, let alone observe. This is mainly because leopards need absolute invisibility to hunt. This is why they're such good climbers and why they evolved to be so incredibly secretive.

S1E5 • The Secret Lives of Big Cats • 2019 • Nature

47:44

Climb to the top of erupting volcanoes and relive the devastation caused by earthquakes to discover how they created the Europe we know today.

S1E2 • Birth of Europe • 2011 • Nature