Video documentaries about science and technology
Voyage of the Continents episode 1: The history of Oceania is the history of the Earth as a whole. Along with scientists, we track the information recorded in its relief, from the first forms of life on Earth, to their destruction and rebirth. Welded to Antarctica for millions of years, Australia is today a deserted landscape that enjoys extraordinary stability. […]
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Secrets of the Jurassic Dinosaurs episode 1: Liz Bonnin joins an international team of palaeontologists in the remote badlands of Wyoming as they investigate a mysterious dinosaur graveyard. Packed with over a dozen skeletons, including predators such as the fearsome Allosaurus and iconic giants like Diplodocus, as well as fossilised plants and footprints, the site is a treasure trove that
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Islands of Evolution episode 3 – Madeira: In the final episode, Richard Fortey travels to Madeira to examine what happens to a volcanic island as it nears the end of its life cycle and starts sinking back into the sea. Here, in the island’s laurisilva forest, he examines the remains of an ancient forest that once carpeted all of Europe,
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Islands of Evolution episode 2 – Madagascar: Professor Richard Fortey travels to the rainforests of Madagascar – an ancient island that has spawned some of the most extraordinary groups of plants and animals anywhere in the world. From beautiful Indri lemurs, toxic frogs, and the cat-like giant mongoose called the fossa, to evolutionary oddities like the giraffe-necked weevil and the
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Your Inner Fish: An Evolution Story episode 3: In the final episode, Neil tracks our hands, feet, colour vision, spine and upright gait to our primate and hominid progenitors, who also passed on perhaps the most important legacy of all – a path to the human brain. It took more than 350 million years for the
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Islands of Evolution episode 1 – Hawaii: Richard Fortey investigates why islands are laboratories of evolution. On Hawaii he finds honeycreeper birds, carnivorous caterpillars and silversword plants. In the first episode, Fortey is on Hawaii to investigate how life colonises a newly born island. According to some estimates, Hawaii has been successfully colonised by only one new species every 35,000
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Your Inner Fish: An Evolution Story episode 2 traces our hair, skin, teeth, jaws and sense of hearing back to reptilian ancestors – from ferocious beasts that ruled the Earth, to a little shrew-like animal that lived 195 million years ago. It took more than 350 million years for the human body to take shape. Anatomist
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Your Inner Fish: An Evolution Story episode 1: It took more than 350 million years for the human body to take shape. Anatomist Neil Shubin reveals how our bodies are the legacy of ancient fish, reptiles and primates, the ancestors you never knew were in your family tree. Our bodies carry the anatomical legacy of animals that lived hundreds of
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The Beginning and End of the Universe episode 2: Professor Jim Al-Khalili carries us into the distant future to try to discover how the universe will end – with a bang or a whimper? He reveals a universe far stranger than anyone imagined and, at the frontier of our understanding, encounters a mysterious and enigmatic force that promises to change
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The Beginning and End of the Universe episode 1: Professor Jim Al-Khalili takes us back in time to tackle the greatest question in science: how did the universe begin? Uncovering the origins of the universe is regarded as humankind’s greatest intellectual achievement. By recreating key experiments Jim unravels the cosmic mystery of science’s creation story before witnessing a moment, one
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The Incredible Human Journey episode 5 – The Americas: Alice Roberts investigates how humans may have reached North and South America, looking at routes across the Canadian ice sheet and from Australia across the Pacific. For Stone Age people, reaching North and South America seems impossible – on each side vast oceans, and to the north an impenetrable ice sheet
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The Incredible Human Journey episode 4 – Australia: Dr Alice Roberts looks at our ancestors’ seemingly impossible journey to Australia. There are seven billion humans on Earth, spread across the whole planet. Scientific evidence suggests that most of us can trace our origins to one tiny group of people who left Africa around 70,000 years ago. In this five-part series,
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