The Nature of Things

First Animals (59x5)

: 25, 2019

For most of its existence, planet Earth has been a brutal, inhospitable, toxic nightmare, until a half billion years ago when – KABOOM! – life suddenly appeared. First Animals, a new documentary from The Nature of Things, takes you back to the Cambrian Explosion through newly-discovered fossils that tell us more about our own origins. Renowned evolutionary biologist Maydianne Andrade is our guide, showing us how complex – and dangerous – life among the first animals really was. “The information embedded in this rock is evolution’s raw data,” says Andrade. “We see how the first guts digested food, how the first eyes processed images, how the first hunters tracked down their prey. “These are the very early building blocks of animal evolution.” High up a mountainside in a British Columbia fossil bed, Andrade joins a team from the Royal Ontario Museum, led by paleontologist Jean-Bernard Caron. They are literally exposing hundreds of new fossils every day.