Yours

Film199633 min976×720Subtitles

1996 VHS • Eyewitness Shell 60 FPS

The Vista Group®

At the Internet Archive

Clips are not offered for this film: no licence or public-domain mark is recorded for it.

About

Eyewitness Shell is a documentary program from the BBC Eyewitness series, structured around the Eyewitness Shell book and produced in the series' white-background studio format with international location footage.

The program examines shells as a survival strategy across hundreds of thousands of species: fossil shell history and the limestone landscapes formed by ancient marine creatures, the mythology of ammonites as petrified serpents in medieval Whitby, shell growth mechanics through the mantle's secretion of calcium carbonate, spiral growth patterns and the gastropod family, the mobility-protection tradeoff for shelled animals, bivalve filter feeding and the hinge muscle defense, predator-prey arms races among shells, the cone shell's paralytic sting, Portuguese man-of-war predation by immune mollusks, the Japanese carrier shell's decorative camouflage, scallop eyes and locomotion, the chitin exoskeleton of scorpions, woodlice, and lobsters, molting and its vulnerabilities, the internal shells of cuttlefish and giant squid, the nautilus and submarine design, Tyrian purple dye from the murex snail, wampum currency among Native Americans of the eastern United States, cowry shells as legal tender in Africa, pearl formation by oysters, the coconut palm's shell and the robber crab, barnacles and shipworm tunneling, the Brunel Thames Tunnel, giant clams, leatherback sea turtles, and land crabs on Christmas Island. The birds' egg shell is presented as a closing subject alongside shell mythology including the Mayan Quetzalcoatl origin story.

The behind-the-scenes segment recounts filming a crew electrician, the only person small enough to fit, wearing a suit of medieval armor to recreate a comparison shot with a previously filmed lobster, ending when the armor seized up on camera.

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