Life on Earth: The Greatest Story Ever Told

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The chapter on reptiles shows how they evolved from their ancestors, how they spread over the land and became the rulers of the world - the dinosaurs - and how even these massive animals fell victim to some unknown mishap, leaving the earth in turn to become populated by our ancestors, the primitive mammals. The British Vice-Governor of the Galapagos told Darwin that even within the archipelago, there was variety: the tortoises on each island were slightly different, so that it was possible to tell which island they came from.

The series attracted a weighted average of 15 million viewers in the UK, an exceptionally high figure for a BBC documentary back in the late 1970s.Will usually dispatch within same working day if paid before 14:00 GMT (excludes weekends and holidays). I intend no minimisation of the debt owed to them by all of us who take pleasure in watching and thinking about animals. The life cycles of creatures are explained with reference to the Darwinian ideas of natural and sexual selection. The scales protect the body from wear and tear and in the case of some species of lizard, such as the Australian thorny devil, serve to protect from attack.

Their acute sense of vision led to them standing erect to spot predators, leaving their hands free to bear weapons. Descended from segmented sea creatures, millipedes were among the first to take advantage of such a habitat and were quickly followed by other species.The best remembered sequence occurs in the twelfth episode, when Attenborough encounters a group of mountain gorillas in Dian Fossey's sanctuary in Rwanda. The differences between them and their mainland cousins were only small, but if such changes had taken place, was it not possible that over many millions of years, the cumulative effects on a dynasty of animals could be so great that they could bring about major transformations? But then the idea formed in my mind that a group of us might make a series of films that portrayed animals in a slightly different way.