Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives is a four-part BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 documentary

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

 series concerning the discovery of fossils. It is written and presented by David Attenborough

David Attenborough

Sir David Frederick Attenborough OM, CH, CVO, CBE, FRS, FZS, FSA is a British broadcaster and naturalist. His career as the face and voice of natural history programmes has endured for more than 50 years...

, produced by Mike Salisbury

Mike Salisbury

John Michael Salisbury, OBE is a British documentary filmmaker specialising in natural history programmes for television. In a career spanning four decades, he spent over 30 years working for the BBC Natural History Unit where he produced a string of award-winning series, many in collaboration...

, and was originally broadcast in April 1989.

It was made in between the second and third instalments of Attenborough's "Life" series: The Living Planet

The Living Planet

The Living Planet: A Portrait of the Earth is a BBC nature documentary series written and presented by David Attenborough, first transmitted in the UK from 19 January 1984....

and The Trials of Life

The Trials of Life

The Trials of Life: A Natural History of Behaviour is a BBC nature documentary series written and presented by David Attenborough, first transmitted in the UK from 4 October 1990....

, respectively.

The study of rock

Rock (geology)

In geology, rock or stone is a naturally occurring solid aggregate of minerals and/or mineraloids.The Earth's outer solid layer, the lithosphere, is made of rock. In general rocks are of three types, namely, igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic...

s and their ancient secrets was something of a boyhood passion for David Attenborough. In these programmes, his enthusiasm for the subject is undiminished. With the help of expert palaeontologists, fossil hunters and (for the time) modern animation

Animation

Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways...

 techniques, Attenborough attempts to show how life evolved in Earth

Earth

Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...

's distant past. To do so, he travels the globe to visit the world's most famous fossil sites.

1. "Magic in the Rocks"

A picture of prehistoric

Prehistory

Prehistory is the span of time before recorded history. Prehistory can refer to the period of human existence before the availability of those written records with which recorded history begins. More broadly, it refers to all the time preceding human existence and the invention of writing...

 life emerges, as Attenborough unearths several major clues in the form of fossilised remains that were undiscovered for millennia.

2. "Putting Flesh on Bone"

Using the latest evidence, scientists reconstruct a pterodactyl in the form of a model aircraft

Aircraft

An aircraft is a vehicle that is able to fly by gaining support from the air, or, in general, the atmosphere of a planet. An aircraft counters the force of gravity by using either static lift or by using the dynamic lift of an airfoil, or in a few cases the downward thrust from jet engines.Although...

 — to see if such a beast could indeed have flown.

3. "Dinosaur"

Attenborough visits several museums of natural history

Natural history

Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards observational rather than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research published in magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, natural history is the systematic study...

. With the aid of dinosaur

Dinosaur

Dinosaurs are a diverse group of animals of the clade and superorder Dinosauria. They were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for over 160 million years, from the late Triassic period until the end of the Cretaceous , when the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event led to the extinction of...

 skeletons, he demonstrates how they existed in real life, and speculates about the reasons for their sudden demise.

4. "The Rare Glimpses"

Four famous locations that have the most suitable conditions for fossilisation are explored. Not only are common animals preserved, but also plants and other, seldom-seen creatures.

Video release

2 Entertain

2 Entertain

2 Entertain is a British video and music publisher, formed by the merger of BBC Video and Video Collection International in 2004....

 published the series on DVD (catalog number BBCDVD1466) on 27 September 2004.

External links

• Lost Worlds Vanished Lives at the British Film Institute
  British Film Institute
  The British Film Institute is a charitable organisation established by Royal Charter to:-Cinemas:The BFI runs the BFI Southbank and IMAX theatre, both located on the south bank of the River Thames in London...