Swamps • 2023 • episode "S2E3" • Prehistoric Planet

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

58:38

In the Land of the Cave Bear, Alice ventures to the parts of the northern hemisphere, hit hardest by the cold - Europe and Siberia. High in the mountains of Transylvania, a cave sealed for thousands of years reveals grisly evidence for a fight to the death between two staving giants, a cave bear and a cave lion. Yet Alice discovers that for woolly rhinos and woolly mammoths, the Ice Age created a bounty. The Mammoth Steppe, a vast tract of land which went half way round the world, provided food all year round, for those that liked the cold. It was these mammoths that Europe's most dangerous predators hunted for their survival.

S1E2 • Ice Age Giants • 2013 • Nature

59:00

Otters are playful, adaptable and champion swimmers - they've captivated cameraman Charlie Hamilton James for the last 25 years. He's filmed them more than anyone else and now, through the eyes of three orphaned river otters, a set of groundbreaking experiments and some incredible wild encounters, Charlie wants to reveal their survival secrets and exactly why he believes they're so special.

Natural World • 2017 • Nature

20:57

A look at what could make an animal vanish into thin air, what could cause the sea to take on an eerie glow, and what event would bring killer whales together in huge numbers.

S1E8 • Nature's Strangest Mysteries: Solved • 2019 • Nature

39:23

2nd prog in series about fossils. David Attenborough investigates some fossil mysteries - could pterodactyls fly? And why did trilobites have such good eyes?

S1E2 • Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives • 1989 • Nature

42:14

Along Patagonia's Pacific coast are the deep, sheltered fjords. These beautiful, flooded valleys were carved out by ice over millennial.

S1E2 • Patagonia: Life on the Edge of the World • 2022 • Nature