1996 VHS • Eyewitness Prehistoric Life 60 FPS

About

Eyewitness Prehistoric Life is a documentary program from the BBC Eyewitness series, tracing the full span of life on Earth from the Big Bang through the emergence of modern humanity.

The program covers creation mythology from Chinese and Aboriginal Australian traditions before moving to scientific accounts: the Big Bang, Earth's formation 4.5 billion years ago, the primordial soup, the oldest known fossils of algae at 3.5 billion years, multi-celled life and the Ediacaran soft-bodied fauna, the Cambrian explosion including Hallucigenia and its later reinterpretation, Cathernocystis, trilobites and their compound eyes, the first jawed fish and the armored Dunkleosteus, radiocarbon and uranium-238 dating methods pioneered in part by Marie Curie, the colonization of land by plants and then arthropods, Gondwanaland and continental drift, the first amphibians and the coelacanth fossil connection, the cockroach lineage beginning in the coal-age forests, Gigantoscorpio and giant dragonflies of the Carboniferous, Mary Anning's ichthyosaur discovery at age 11, Pangaea and the distribution of identical fossils across South America and Australia, Tyrannosaurus rex and the giant pterosaur reconstructed in the Nevada desert at half scale, the two great extinction events, mammal evolution from warm-blooded nocturnal hunters through the South American mixed-up mammal, Darwin's theory of natural selection and the Galapagos tortoise evidence, Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) and the 3.7-million-year-old Laetoli footprints, Neanderthal reinterpretation from burial of flowers with their dead, Homo sapiens emergence, and the 1995 discovery of Symbion pandora.

The behind-the-scenes segment describes filming the early Earth by building scale model continents on wheels, using a fisheye lens and dry ice for atmosphere, and constructing a primordial soup from wallpaper paste dyed yellow and red.

Human-made No record of this work says a model made it. What this means.

Archive

Internet Archive, in The VHS Vault

Licence or status

The Internet Archive states none for this item.

Credit

The Vista Group®

Language

English

Subtitles

English

Who can watch

The archive gives no rating. Invisible Network shows it to Teens profiles and older, judged from its collection and subjects. How films are placed