What Darwin Never Knew

The earth is abundant with a large variety of different animals, including 28,000 fish species, 9,000 types of bird, and over 350,000 kinds of beetles. What Darwin Never Knew seeks to shed light on the 1.4 million discovered species that live on the planet, in addition to millions of undiscovered ones, and how they came about.

The source of earth’s lifeforms had been an age-old riddle until Charles Darwin came up with the ground-breaking idea of natural selection in his book On the Origin of Species. However, his revolutionary theory gave birth to more questions than it answered. What causes evolution and the transformation of species into others, to what extent to animals rely on a shared genetic toolkit, and how did we ourselves evolve?

What Darwin Never Knew offers answers to these puzzling questions. New breakthroughs in science have connected the mysteries of evolution to the development of the embryo. The film travels from the Galapagos Islands to the Arctic to modern research laboratories, tracking the dramatic increase in animal species half a billion years ago.