First Life (TV series)

The first ancient living being mentioned in the episode is Charnia, an Ediacaran lifeform[3] whose fossil was first found in Charnwood Forest. Stromatolites,[4] which still live in Western Australia are also shown. With the palaeontologist Dr Guy Narbonne, Attenborough visits Mistaken Point where there are hundreds of fossils of Charnia and other animals of which the most common is Fractofusus (thousands of specimens).[5] In the Ediacara Hills Attenborough is shown by palaeontologist Dr Jim Gehling fossils of Dickinsonia.[6] In the same place there are also fossils of Kimberella, a slug-like animal[7] and Spriggina.[8] These animals are the first to have been mobile and have bilateral symmetry, Spriggina being the first to clearly have a head and a tail. In the same hills palaeontologist Dr Mary Droser shows Funisia[9] the first animal for which there is evidence of sexual reproduction. In Switzerland Attenborough visits a very large synchrotron which is used by Professor Philip Donoghue to take microscopic 3-dimensional pictures of the interior of fossilized embryos, including Markuelia[10] an animal which lived 20 million years after the animals of Ediacara and one of the first to have a gut.

One of the first big predators was Anomalocaris,[11][12] found in the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies. Its prey probably included animals such as Opabinia,[13] Wiwaxia,[14] Hallucigenia.[15] Professor Justin Marshall shows mantis shrimp,[16] which are similar to Anomalocaris. One of the most successful arthropod groups were the Trilobites.[17] Some of the biggest were the Eurypterids, or sea scorpions, such as Pterygotus,[18] of which a large fossil exists in the vaults of the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Aysheaia[19] is thought to be the ancestor of the first land animal. A very similar land animal, the velvet worm, still lives in the tropics including the rainforest in Queensland, Australia.[20] The oldest known fossil of an air-breathing arthropod is the 428 million-year-old Pneumodesmus,[21] a millipede.[22]