Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives
Could a pterodactyl as large as a light aircraft have flown? Did millipedes once grow to six feet long? How did insects become preserved in amber for over 50 million years?
All these questions and more are answered through the study of fossils. In his journeys to the most famous fossil sites in the world, David Attenborough discovers a pre-historic world teeming with life and full of enticing clues as to how life evolved.
They reveal how dinosaurs hunted, lived in groups and cared for their young. And they offer glimpses of the most bizarre creatures that ever lived, such as tiny horses and an animal that is half bird and half reptile.
With the help of expert palaeontologists, fossil enthusiasts from around the world and sophisticated modeling. Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives breathes life into Earth's distant past.
I always find it funny when people trying to prove there is not god by asking who created god? this is a circular argument, because then we can ask who created the first particle of anything? if we are honest, believers in a god and atheist are practicing the same religion, both camps are stating their faiths. One because it makes sense to them to have a designer, the other side base their belief there is no god on a tiny decimal percentage of knowledge we have yet to uncover. For the sale of argument if there is a god like the monotheist religions say our consciousness can not be compared to god's consciousness.... I haven't watched the documentary yet, either way I hope to enjoy it.
Wow that was a marathon! Thanks for posting this Vlatko :). I have watched hundreds of docs here and I really appreciate your efforts.
Keep well,
David Attenborough is the best.
His brother started my fascination with prehistory in "Jurassic Park" when I was a kid, and now he's teaching me all about life and evolution as an adult. Cool family.
Excellent Documentary!
Fascinating. Now I know how stones form, others than lava stones. By the way, I'm from Finland and we too have our internet-active creationists. Some of them are actually quite knowledgeable, made me seriously question how our genes are developing over lifetimes. You shouldn't dismiss them, even though I doubt they're right about us being 6000 years old, there's so much speaking on the contrary and I've not really seen them proving that we would be, other than through bible, and to my best knowledge bible isn't all what it used to be when it was first written. Thinking otherwise without proof would be naive, yet it shouldn't be dismissed since who knows what parts of it are still like in the authentic version.
ha ha,,,well i support socialized medicine too. Hope US becomes more like Canada, and some other EU countries.
I will not reveal my location, but lets just say I am hiding behind my igloo waiting for America to fail, and when it does I will skate south, conquer, and install socialized medicine.
Jay, where are you from? Majority of Americans are actually pretty smart and intelligent, except some racist conservatives.
... I am in Ohio and I greatly disagree.
I skipped after 53 seconds
I would bet 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000 dollars that every creationist that replied is from the united states.
The downfall of every great nation slowly begins with the rise of radical religious practice.
TIPS FOR AMERICANS BELOW
1)educate your kids better
2)educate yourself better
3)stop watching news casts where they have a republican/democrat each explain the news after it is reported because people are to dumb to realize whether they should be mad or not
4)be open minded, you are probably not a scientist, so don't pretend you are smarter than one... eg pollution and its effects on the environment
5)stop blaming your problems on immigrants, they have zero percent blame on your countries problems
6)stop believing the propaganda in the news that the giant corporations spread to dumb people ie. oil companies and pollution, banking firms and "red tape", Iraq
7)do something to stop above companies, there growing so fast and so powerful that they are almost above the government
8)cut lobbying out of the government all together... a fool could see how ridiculously corrupt that sht is
9)stop believing for a second that you are better than anybody else in the world. Your parents/grandparents might have been but your country NOW is a shell of what it once was.
if you think immigrants don't ruin things come to my neighborhood 4 miles in any direction from downtown los angeles
Wow, thanks Jay. How long did you live in America in order to make such an informed statement?
By the way, you would come across and a lot more credible if you possessed a greater command of the English language.
"By the word religion I have seen the lunacy of fanatics of every denomintaion be called the will of God". From Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven.
God did not create men. Men created God - to quell his fears and quiet his insecurities. The God fearing believe that without the divine we have no reason to be moral and without heaven we have no reason at all to live.
The rational minded athiest finds a sense of purpose within himself and knows that logic and reasoning are more than enough to keep a sane man moral.
What is strange to me is that some species are same 200 million years before and now!? Like those ants, flies, mosquitoes...and also sea creatures like worms, frogs, fish... It is strange that some species are same for such a long period of time, while for that same amount of time many other animals developed and get extinct etc.
For sure life is very old, and who knows what was going on this earth during the billions of years, and it is very complicated to understand all of that and to find out all answers, but that is interesting and challenging. Religious answers are ignorant and I really can not understand people who are not brave and independent enough to think with their own heads and use straight logic and evidence. Even than, with our greatest efforts life stays wonderful and miraculous, no religion can be so miraculous as life is itself.
i call it the "horseshoe crab/cockroach paradox", but when examined with ones mindset on the causation of natural selection, the answer becomes obvious... the "paradoxical" organisms are INCREDIBLY efficient at exploiting the resource niche they occupy, so much so they become a "top level exploiter" of that particular niche... until something else evolves that can more efficiently exploit said resources, there is no impetus for change, no advantage of any real merit that any reasonable mutation could give, if the mutated offspring have no advantage over the standard form offspring, then the "status quo" continues... let a mutation cause an advantage, and then "natural selection" will occur... this is why (as an example of "after the advantage") humans and chimps are so closely related, yet different in so many anatomical ways... we diverged from a common ancestor, who was less advantaged at resource exploitation under the conditions that both hominid, and chimp variations had efficiency of exploitation... thus, our common ancestor disappears over time, as do the mutational variants that are surpassed by either the "base variant" (the first level of mutation), or variants of later form of mutation that surpass the efficiency of all groups along that lineage (as evidenced by the lack of any proto- or mid hominid relatives still wandering about, they starved off as our line flourished).... but, chimps wont do well on the savanah, and we humans really arent too good at life as tree dwellers, so both lines coexist, due to a lack of competition for resources, and efficiency of exploitation in our adapted environs
@ Jose
Come on man, those where definetly not snakes. R you even seriouse? I do not condemn the theist at all, I condemn organized religion and people as ill informed as Jose obviousely is. People like this, if Jose was seriouse, are what give theism a bad name. Through out the years organized religion and other crzy theist have made silly impossible asertions, but thier are sane and logical theists as well. Some are theist because of personal experiences and some through logical deduction (see the cosmological arguement for example) While this arguement does rest on some assumptions those assumptions are not radical and do follow logic. I am a non-believer yes an atheist, but it only proves my faith in science. Theist just have faith about something else but they are still doing what we are doing, following thier gut. No one truly knows. I feel that as we make more discoveries and workthrough more theories we will finally make sence of our origins, but I don't think we will ever have all the answers. All I ask is if you are a thiest please do not just conform to accepted dogma. Think for your self search out god on a personal level. Also keep an open mind toward science. Science its self is not a collection of scientist or everyone on this sites opinions, it is a method thats all. The scientific method is wonderful for sorting out the physical world. When it comes to the supernatural though science is useless. This is what upsets a lot of scientist when they are having a scientific discussion and someone throws in god. This stops all science as it can not be measured, observed, or constructed mathematically. So it isn't that they necessarily hate religion it is that they see no place for it when they are discussing science. I know both deal with the same subject but I feel they should not mix. Spirituality would lose alot of its worth if it was definable or able to be explained by science. I wish you all passion concerning what ever you decide is for you.
@ Anemos and cosmic cop. Bravo great job by both of you drawing out the nature of some of the atheist loons. I am neither atheist nor religious and I watch and laugh every time some so called atheist comes out swinging with quotes like "open your eyes" and "You creationists refuse to see anyone else ideas because you are blind and judgmental. Your wars are evil killing is wrong die die die for not seeing as I do In gods name I condemn thee Alla Aqbar!!!! I mean religion=fail" They live to be an example of what they hate in others hahaha
I cal totally see that those were snakes. Obviously when they turned them into stone, of course they had to cut their heads. I can't believe how people don't understand that God with his own hand wrote it in the bible.
Cosmic Cop03/23/2010 at 18:09
Its obviously Satan’s tricks with a combination of Atheist’s carving stone, not exposing fossils, trying to trick us creationist’s. I loved it. Amazing the trouble some people go through to muddy the water for God belief. Thank God I have the Faith to close my eyes to such lie’s
come on... rly? you don't see it?he is mocking the religulus
and provoking the secularists at the same time.
excellently done Bravo
@Anemus
Huh? I didn't understand what you meant. Probably just me but could you explain.
arguing against Cosmic cops sarcasm proves that religion or not fools be fools
I did enjoy this doc...... but it lacked anything that made it stand apart from similar docs on these topics...still liked it though......
@COSMIC COP fux the cops and your god. why is it that religious people ,such as yourself,always bring god into everything. Open your mind to facts and evidence . Do you belive in the easter bunny or humpty dumpty? No! Because they dont exist and neither does any god. Know what the diff between jesus himself and a picture of him is? Only need 1nail to hang the picture .........jk i dont hate religious people. I just think their stupid to ignore fact and retarded to allow themselves to be so brainwashed to the point that even hard evidence will not sway them from str8 superstition and pure nonsense of an incompetent diety who killed his own son and cant seem to balance his check book,but yet he created the entire universe in 7 days.Surely there are some doubts in your mind on this issue.Oh wait ,you have "faith" LOL-faith is just wishfull thinking.............. creationism....... what an easy way to scare people into submission. Just tell your kids they will burn in torment in hell on fire in total agony for eternity and that will get some obedience out of them......... a religious man should never rule..... more people have been killed in the name of "god" than anything because every religion thinks its the right one. They cant all be right but the can all be and are wrong......................... dont need religion to be a good person.
@cosmic cop.
you may be put off by Attenborough because he deals in EVIDENCE and where possible, EXPERIMENTATION and OBSERVATION along with careful REASONING from the experiments and observed phenomena. this loop feeds and helps to create and refine a THEORY that attempts to explain some facet of the universe. what YOU seem to propose is mindless and uncritical acceptance of a backward and many-times discredited ancient superstition, plain and simple.
EVENTUALLY, what anyone will ask you is WHERE is the evidence for your parochial, invisible guy in the sky? ONE SHRED of scientific evidence will be an amazing breakthrough enough.
but before we can even get there, we must ask you to DEFINE your invisible guy in the sky. I KNOW you can't do that in any coherent way (cuz it's a completely EMPTY notion), so why are we wasting our time discussing evidence prematurely?
Thomas Paine, one of the American founding fathers once said that attempting to argue with one who has renounced reason is like trying to administer medicine to the dead. You religionists have DEAD MINDS... killed off by the poisons of superstition and ignorance.
it's never too late to attempt a resuscitation, though.
Open your mind. It's a big and awe-inspiring world out there. Treat yourself to some of it.
On a more sriouse note, isn't Attenborough great. I've watched him the whole time I was growing up-mid thirties that's all I am saying. He taught me more about the diversity of life than anyone else. Let us hope that our current generation will continue to produce scientist of his caliber.
@cosmic cop
You don't really believe that. I refuse to think someone would know how to use a computer and still think like that. I think you just wanted to rock the boat, right. Well if you do believe that I'm including my email adress, I got a car I need to sell you. Matter of fact I have all kinds of miracles and wonders just contact me. I got me some lookin glasses, you can see plum to the stars- it's a miracle! I got goats to sacrifice and I'm sure we can find some poor soul that looks different that we can blame for last years crop not comin' in.
hey bo, who/what created the universe?
cosmic cop, just saying, your religion has killed more people in the name of a book written by men who heard voices in their head... thats all im going to say, and all im going to post.
Cosmic Cop .. think outside the box dude ;\
yeah cosmic cop, youre right and everybody else is wrong. Who created the creator? oh thats right god just happened to be there. If you really believed in your belief so much, you should probably dedicate your life to actually finding some evidence to share with the world. You know what tho? God bless you because we all live in our own reality. Doesnt actually matter who's right as long as you are happy.
Its obviously Satan’s tricks with a combination of Atheist’s carving stone, not exposing fossils, trying to trick us creationist’s. I loved it. Amazing the trouble some people go through to muddy the water for God belief. Thank God I have the Faith to close my eyes to such lie's.
Very cool.
Don't worry ... they are still evolving.
Hopefully
Oh come on... cut 'em some slack :-) But even if we're going to hell: at least we can avoid using cut and paste!
Good doc indeed. (A young) David Attenborough is always a pleasure to watch.
A nice doc - A youngish David Attenborough showing yet more huge evidence of fossil / evolution that will be attacked and abused by scabby snotty creationist a$$holes with no imagination or understanding.