1995 VHS • Eyewitness Skeleton 60 FPS

About

Eyewitness Skeleton is a documentary program from the BBC Eyewitness series, featuring a computer-generated character named Smedley as a recurring host figure and structured around the Eyewitness Skeleton book.

The program surveys skeletal systems across the animal kingdom: the endoskeleton shared by fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals; the human skeleton's reduction from over 300 bones at birth to 206 in adulthood; bird bone structure and air sacs enabling flight; locomotion mechanics from hip ball-and-socket joints to knee hinges; the fossil record from ammonites and dinosaurs through primitive hominids; the spine's evolution from horizontal to vertical for bipedal humans; cartilage in sharks and rays; the diversity of hind limb tools across species; bone composition as living tissue with marrow and mineral storage; rib cage function; vertebral count from nine in frogs to 400 in some snakes; exoskeletons and molting in crustaceans; coral reef formation; shell types from limpets to giant clams; the armadillo's toughened hide; turtle shell anatomy; the skull as lifestyle blueprint; jaws and teeth across herbivores, rodents, lions, snakes, and scarlet macaws; ivory and tusk adaptations in elephants, walruses, and narwhals; antlers and thermoregulation; cultural uses of the skull in Tibetan ceremony, pirate iconography, and Mexican Day of the Dead traditions; and the hand and forelimb as the most versatile skeletal structure.

The behind-the-scenes segment describes constructing a three-dimensional optical illusion of a skull from a pastoral scene to open the program, a process requiring 12 hours of set-building and precise millimeter adjustments around a seated model.

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