Airdate: David Attenborough’s Rise Of Animals

Last week ABC1 Channel Controller Brendan Dahill said Dvid Attenborough truly belonged on the public broadcaster.

“They’re just pretending they’ve got Attenborough,” he said of commercial rivals.

“It’s only an Attenborough show where he’s in vision. The ones he’s just voicing are just a super-annuation slush fund.”

This Sunday he’s back, in camera and not just doing voice-overs, in a new two-part series, David Attenborough’s Rise Of Animals.

In this two-part series, David Attenborough embarks on an epic 500 million year journey to unravel the incredible rise of the vertebrates. He presents explosive new fossil evidence from a region he’s long dreamt of exploring – the frontier of modern paleontological research: China. Brand new discoveries of fossils – ancient and living – combined with stunning CGI and cinematography enable David to tell this fascinating story and reveal that humans are the heirs to a magnificent evolutionary heritage.

In episode one: From the Seas to the Skies, David begins his journey in the Chinese province of Yunnan, where he joins an excavation team as they unearth creatures entombed in an ancient seabed 525 million years ago. Amongst these unique fossil beds, he reveals the origin of our backbone – in a paperclip-sized primitive fish called Myllokunmingia – preserved in extraordinary detail and brought to life in stunningly realistic CGI. Incredibly, its living descendant is found on David’s doorstep – in a river in the South of England.

In the USA, scientists studying the developing embryos of sharks and rays reveal evidence for the next key step in the vertebrates’ story – the evolution of the jaw.

A new discovery on the remote Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic has unearthed the remains of a predatory fish with limb-like, bony fins that helped it to move around in swamps. David next observes how a Chinese Giant Salamander retains the lungs that, along with limbs, helped the first amphibians to finally emerge on to land.

In a living lizard and at the Lufeng Dinosaur National Geopark in Yunnan, David sees how watertight skin and eggs allowed the reptiles and dinosaurs to colonise the driest parts of Earth. Finally, in the province of Liaoning in Northern China, David visits China’s ‘Pompeii’, where volcanic ash has preserved the remains of a previously unknown group of small, tree-living dinosaurs that evolved feathers, and ultimately turned into birds.

7:30pm Sunday February 9 ABC1.