In 2005, an extraordinary discovery forever altered the way scientists approach the fossil record. Fossils of dinosaur bones that appeared to contain soft tissues, blood vessels, and even cells—materials once thought to deteriorate too rapidly to survive millions of years—brought a profound shift in paleontology and the study of ancient life.

This finding, led by Dr. Mary Schweitzer and her team, not only questioned long-held assumptions but also sparked an entirely new realm of research into how biomolecules could persist through deep time.

The Breakthrough That Shook the Paleontological World

Before 2005, paleontologists primarily focused on the fossilized remnants of hard materials like bones, teeth, and shells to understand ancient life. Soft tissues and biomolecules—such as proteins, lipids, and sugars—were believed to break down within a relatively short period after an organism’s death.

The notion was that, over millions of years, the delicate structures of cells, blood vessels, and other tissues would be destroyed by both physical and biological forces.

However, Dr. Schweitzer’s team uncovered something remarkable in a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil. They discovered blood vessels and cells that appeared to have survived 68 million years of decay.

The discovery was met with skepticism and controversy. Many scientists doubted whether such preservation was even possible. Over time, however, Schweitzer’s findings were corroborated by further studies, pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge and techniques.

This opened up new discussions around the preservation of biomolecules and whether certain extreme conditions could enable their survival over geological time.

Pushing the Limits of Fossil Preservation

The 2005 discovery set off a systematic search for similar evidence across various dinosaur fossils. Researchers quickly realized that these findings were not isolated incidents but rather part of a broader, more complex preservation process. This recognition opened doors to innovative methods of extracting and analyzing biomolecules from fossils.

One key challenge in studying fossilized cells is ensuring that the structures have not been contaminated by modern substances. To overcome this, scientists developed advanced imaging and chemical analysis techniques.

The use of high-powered microscopy and spectrometry also revealed the molecular signature of proteins and lipids within these ancient tissues. Furthermore, new chemical techniques allow scientists to extract and analyze genetic materials from fossils.

What Can Fossilized Dinosaur Cells Teach Us?

Studying ancient cells and soft tissues provides invaluable insights into the biology and evolution of extinct species. The preservation of blood vessels and cellular networks offers a rare opportunity to understand how dinosaurs and other ancient creatures interacted with their environment on a biological level.

Researchers can study how ancient species metabolized food, interacted with one another, and evolved over time. Also, according to Nature, the genetic material preserved in these ancient tissues sheds light on the evolutionary history of life on Earth.

It provides critical data that connects long-extinct creatures to modern animals, allowing scientists to trace the roots of certain species back millions of years. In addition to paleontological benefits, these discoveries are extending to astrobiology.

As we search for life beyond Earth, the study of ancient biomolecular survival could offer critical clues about how life might exist in extreme environments, such as the icy surface of Europa or the dry desert of Mars.

What’s Next for Ancient Biomolecules?

The next steps in this field will likely involve more advanced preservation techniques and increasingly detailed molecular analyses.

The potential for extracting and analyzing genetic material from fossils opens up exciting possibilities for reconstructing the genomes of long-extinct creatures.

This could allow researchers to understand not just their evolution but also their behavior and environmental adaptations.

Fossils of some of Earth’s earliest animals have been found in one of the world’s most spectacular sites: North America’s Grand Canyon.

The fossils date to between 507 and 502 million years ago (mya) in the middle of the Cambrian period which lasted from 541 to 485 mya. The Cambrian saw an evolutionary “explosion” with all the basic body types seen in modern animals first appearing in Earth’s ancient seas during this period.

It’s the first time Cambrian fossils have been found in the Grand Canyon.

Sternal elements of crustaceans from the Cambrian period. Credit: Mussini et al.

The rich deposit, detailed in a paper published in Science Advances, includes tiny, rock-scraping molluscs, filter feeding crustaceans, spiky-toothed worms and possibly fragments of some of the food these ancient creatures ate.

Most Cambrian animals had hard outer shells. Soft body parts have been found in some places around the world, like Canada’s famous Cambrian site the Burgess Shale formation and China’s Maotianshan Shales. Soft body parts from the Cambrian tend to be from oxygen- and resource-poor environments which are perfect for rapid fossilisation.

Grand Canyon. Credit: Joe Clevenger.

The new Grand Canyon discovery, however, includes the world’s first soft-bodied Cambrian fossils from a resource-rich “Goldilocks zone” which would have provided conditions for accelerated evolution of early animals.

During the Cambrian, the Grand Canyon was closer to the equator and had oxygen-rich waters which were neither too deep nor too shallow. They were “just right” for supporting the evolution of early animals.

“These rare fossils give us a fuller picture of what life was like during the Cambrian period,” says first author Giovanni Mussini, a PhD student at the UK’s University of Cambridge. “By combining these fossils with traces of their burrowing, walking, and feeding – which are found all over the Grand Canyon – we’re able to piece together at an entire ancient ecosystem.”

“Surprisingly, we haven’t had much of a Cambrian fossil record of this kind from the Grand Canyon before. There have been finds of things like trilobites and biomineralised fragments, but not much in the way of soft-bodied creatures,” says Mussini. “But the geology of the Grand Canyon, which contains lots of fine-grained and easily split mud rocks, suggested to us that it might be just the sort of place where we might be able to find some of these fossils.”

Mussini and colleagues first dissolved the rock around the fossils using a solution of hydrofluoric acid. The sediment was then passed through sieves to release thousands of tiny fossils.

These were then examined under high-powered microscopes to reveal their features.

Many of the fossils resemble modern-day crustaceans including shrimp. Others are molluscs similar to today’s slugs.

The microscopic analysis revealed many of the complex ways these early animals were evolving to catch and eat their prey.

The crustaceans had hair-like extensions on triangular grooves around their mouths and hairy limbs used to sweep passing food particles into their mouths like a conveyor belt. The molluscs had chains of teeth, like those of a modern garden snail, which they likely used to scrape algae or bacteria off rocks.

“These were cutting-edge ‘technologies’ for their time, integrating multiple anatomical parts into high-powered feeding systems,” Mussini says.

The team also identified a new species of ancient priapulid – a group known as penis or cactus worms. These were widespread during the Cambrian but are nearly extinct today. The Grand Canyon fossil priapulid had hundreds of complex branching teeth which it used to sweep food into its extendible mouth.

The researchers named the new animal Kraytdraco spectatus, after the fictional krayt dragon from the Star Wars universe.

Illustration of the mouth of Kraytdraco spectatus. Credit: Rhydian Evans.

The region during the Grand Canyon was likely a prime location for evolutionary experimentation of early animals.

“Animals needed to keep ahead of the competition through complex, costly innovations, but the environment allowed them to do that,” Mussini explains. “In a more resource-starved environment, animals can’t afford to make that sort of physiological investment. It’s got certain parallels with economics: invest and take risks in times of abundance; save and be conservative in times of scarcity. There’s a lot we can learn from tiny animals burrowing in the sea floor 500 mya.”

A stunning new fossil find from the Grand Canyon fills in some blanks from a time when evolution began experimenting with weird new forms.

About half a billion years ago, life on Earth really started cooking in an event we now call the Cambrian explosion. The fossil record from that time reveals a spike in bizarre, complex creatures appearing within a relatively short amount of time, laying the roots for most of the major animal groups that exist today.

Frustratingly, fossils from later in the Cambrian period are rarer, so we don’t have a clear picture of evolution’s experimental second album.

But a newly discovered batch of extremely well-preserved fossils could patch up that gap. These are about 505 million years old – 3 million years younger than the Burgess Shale, the layer in which fossils from the Cambrian explosion appear.

Related: The First Explosion of Life on Earth Made an Impact Deep Under The Surface

A team led by researchers at the University of Cambridge found more than 1,500 small, carbonaceous fossils in samples from the Bright Angel Formation (BAF) of the Grand Canyon, which was once a shallow marine environment. The vast majority of the fossils are priapulid worms, along with a couple hundred crustaceans and a few mollusks.

Although ecological resources were plentiful at the time, competition was also on the rise, rewarding species that exploited new niches. Analysis of these fossils revealed a variety of adaptations to do just that.

A worm species called Kraytdraco spectatus, for example, was found to be covered in teeth sporting elaborate filaments, which varied in shape and length based on where they were on the body. The researchers suggest that they used their tougher teeth to scrape and rake surfaces, kicking up food particles that they could then filter out of the water using the longer filaments.

Crustacean fossils featured signs of suspension feeding by way of tiny hairs that pushed food particles towards the mouth to be ground up by molar-like structures.

The mollusks, meanwhile, sported rows of shovel-shaped teeth that could have been dragged front-to-back to scrape algae or microbes from surfaces.

The Cambrian explosion gets plenty of attention because it’s so well-represented in the fossil record, but that was just the beginning. The newly described fossils, with their exceptional level of preserved detail, provide a fascinating glimpse into the time soon after that, when complex life was established and comfortable, and had the stability to start innovating with new forms.

And we should be glad it did: most of the major groups (or phyla) of animals got their start during the Cambrian. That includes arthropoda, encompassing all insects, arachnids, and crustaceans. And there’s chordata, which includes us and the rest of our backbone-bearing brethren.

The competitive period of the late Cambrian could have cemented the strategies that helped animals stay successful half a billion years later.

“If the Cambrian Explosion laid the foundations of modern metazoan adaptive solutions, it is the scaling up of their competitive interactions that may have enforced directional, long-term trends of functional innovation in the Phanerozoic biosphere,” the researchers write.

The study was published in the journal Science Advances.

NASA’s Perseverance rover has discovered a rock on Mars that may have once hosted microbial life. The rock, nicknamed Cheyava Falls, has chemical compositions and structures that could have been formed by ancient life, although non-biological processes cannot yet be ruled out.

The search for extraterrestrial life is as much about basic biology, geology and chemistry as it is about seeking to understand our place in the universe. The former came into the spotlight last month, when NASA’s Perseverance rover found a rock with features and chemistry that could have been produced by ancient microbial life on Mars.

On July 21, the rover sampled an arrow-shaped rock, which scientists have nicknamed Cheyava Falls after the highest waterfall in Arizona’s Grand Canyon, and found that it hosts organic compounds , which are the building blocks of life as we know it. Wisping through the length of the rock are veins of calcium sulfate, whose presence suggest a fluid — very likely water — once flowed through the rock. Finally, the rock is speckled with white spots with black rims, in which the rover’s instruments detected iron phosphate molecules. On Earth, similar “leopard spots” are indicative of fossilized records of microbes. In the Cheyava Falls Mars rock, they may be signs of chemical reactions that occurred billions of years ago, which could have served as an energy source for ancient microbial life, the Perseverance science team shared in a NASA statement on July 25.

Taken together, these features are a potential biosignature — intriguing signs that the rock was once home to conditions typically linked to microbial life. While scientists on the Perseverance team are very excited about the rock, they stressed that they did not detect anything that could be fossilized organisms. It is also worth noting that the Perseverance rover isn’t designed to detect and confirm alien life ; it’s collecting samples of scientific interest that will be returned to Earth for further scrutiny.

Perhaps the Cheyava Falls rock could one day address a question that has existed for as long as humans have looked skyward: Are we alone in the universe?

Related: NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover finds possible signs of ancient Red Planet life

The answer may very well land on Earth before the end of next decade, if NASA’s troubled Mars Sample Return program pans out and delivers those precious samples home, where scientists can scrutinize them with a greater variety and complexity of instruments than Perseverance can carry.

“The discovery of life beyond Earth is so profound, so paradigm-shifting, you have to get it right,” Amy Williams, an astrobiologist at the University of Florida who’s on the Perseverance science team, told Space.com in a recent interview. “Once you cross that line, you can’t come back.”

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Space.com sat down with Williams to discuss what makes the Cheyava Falls sample so special, alternate explanations to alien life being considered by the mission team and the role Mars Sample Return would play in vetting the discovery.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

A better look at the exciting rock studied by Perseverance. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

Space.com: What is it about Cheyava Falls that makes it so exciting in the search for alien life?

Amy Williams: This is the most compelling organics signal detection the rover has made so far. [The presence of organics] is always going to be a way for us to triage samples of interest; organic carbon makes up all life as we know it on Earth . But it’s important to note that organic carbon can be made abiotically, i.e., without life. It can be made by geologic processes, and it’s made on meteorites that were delivered to the surface of Mars over its history.

The leopard spots’ texture is one of the things that can also help us identify a region or rock of interest. These spots are circular features of white mineral, and they’ve got a rim of a dark mineral around them. Using our instrument suite, we’re able to determine it contains iron phosphate, and these kinds of features are often associated with microbial life on Earth. Seeing a texture like that, where you have these different redox phases in close proximity to each other, catches our attention, because that is the kind of thing that life could use as an energy source.

We often see calcium sulfate veins cross cutting across a variety of rocks on Mars. It might be that fluids were flowing through the rocks and they deposited those veins; we just drove up off of a delta fan structure, so we know that there was water here in the ancient past .

All of these together are giving us this sense for an environment that was habitable in the ancient past, and some aspects of these features could be consistent with things we see on Earth that are associated with microbial life. That’s why the excitement is here, and why we want to explore these rocks more.

Related: NASA’s Perseverance rover confirms presence of ancient lake on Mars, and it may hold clues to past life

Space.com: Why can’t Perseverance conclusively detect life on Mars?

Williams: The instrument suite onboard Perseverance is meant to triage samples for collection and return to Earth. There are no life-detection instruments onboard the rover.

There are a lot of parties that discuss what it would mean to have conclusive evidence for life on Mars . There are a lot of ways to approach it, and people want to be very conservative about it because once you cross that line, you can’t come back. The discovery of life beyond Earth is so profound, so paradigm-shifting, you have to get it right. That’s why it’s so exciting to see a sample like this, because we have an opportunity to explore that space, to see if we found that evidence.

The instrument [suite] onboard Perseverance is not made to make that detection and confirmation; it’s really the analyses that we can perform back on Earth. For the first time in our history of Mars exploration, we really have a good chance of being able to say something about whether there is evidence for ancient life on Mars or not.

Space.com: What’s the mood like within the Perseverance team?

Williams: There’s excitement in the team of finding something novel, whether or not there’s evidence of life in this rock. It brings fresh energy to the team when we’re working on something that has potential to reveal so much about Mars. There’s always excitement when we collect a sample , and this sample in particular has been awe-inspiring — you take a moment to think about the amazing stuff that this team has been doing and NASA has been doing on Mars and other planetary bodies, so it’s a cool time to step back and appreciate what we’re all working toward.

Space.com: What alternate explanations is the team considering for the newfound features in the Cheyava Falls rock?

Williams: We’re still trying to understand the environmental context for the rock in which this sample came from. For example, we found it close to where two rocks come together, and we’re trying to understand that relationship. We don’t know if these rocks were heated at all in the past — could that have driven any kind of rezoning of the elements? Nearby to those samples are these veins that contain a mineral called olivine — a big crystal made in magmas. Is that related to something that was way up the river valley and was brought in? Is it primary, in which case, how do you reconcile an environment that would be hot enough to have a magma but then also would have this organic carbon? If it were biologic, how do you reconcile that? These are questions that we are certainly grappling with now.

Our goal with the mission has always been to collect the most interesting samples for return to address these profound questions. This is not a slam dunk by any means. There’s multiple lifetimes of questions to address.

Related: Possible sign of Mars life? Curiosity rover finds ‘tantalizing’ Red Planet organics

Space.com: What instruments on Earth could help us find ancient life on Mars?

Williams: We basically have every instrument that the global scientific community can lend.

If you want to look at organic carbon, there are so many ways to detect organic carbon and to learn details about its structure that Perseverance doesn’t have right now. You can do mass spectrometry analyzes to learn more about organic carbon present in that signal we’re getting from SHERLOC [one of Perseverance’s instruments]. Then, you have the potential to say something about the origin of that material: “This is so complex that maybe life made it because we don’t know about abiotic process that can make it,” or “This looks just like what you would see in a meteorite, [so] there’s no reason that it would be been made by life,” or [perhaps] you still cannot say either way.

When you bring samples back, depending on what they’re made of, we should be able to get ages on them. You can [then] tell something about when water was flowing on Mars. If we did think there was life, you can potentially be able to say how long ago it might have been there. There’s all these paths you can go down and start to extrapolate. That’s just on the astrobiology side of things — the tiniest wedge of things that I do and am excited about — but there’s this whole pie of exciting science that we get to do with these samples if we can have them returned.

Space.com: We don’t know what alien life looks like, so what would the search for it entail? For instance, would it be an elimination game where we rule out abiotic processes, or do we have a comprehensive catalog of signals from living organisms to tally the Cheyava Falls sample with?

Williams: The concept of life as we don’t know it is always around the corner, and something that we should consider — even on a world that is seemingly as similar to Earth as Mars is.

What you’re looking at is [whether] you see multiple lines of evidence that all point in either a biotic direction or an abiotic direction. In some ways, the most challenging answer would be both, because then it’s still an ambiguous answer and you can’t dissociate between the two. That is science.

Do we have a catalog of, “This is what biologic looks like, and this is what abiotic processes make?” Yes, and it’s still evolving. I predict that if you bring a Mars sample home, scientific energy and research will turn in the direction of how you can separate out the gray areas of abiotic and biotic, and how we can refine how that space is determined to be able to say something specific about these extraordinary samples from Jezero Crater.

Related: Perseverance rover’s Mars rock sample may contain best evidence of possible ancient life

Space.com: How is the Perseverance rover doing? What’s next for the mission?

Williams: I like to think that she’s a happy rover, that she gets some joy from doing this.

The rover is performing fantastic. We are finishing up the margin of Jezero Crater. Our plan has always been to climb out of the Jezero Crater and explore this really ancient Noachian terrain — one of the earliest time periods on Mars where there was water. Getting into a timeframe that we really haven’t explored in situ before is extremely exciting.

It’s great to have this excitement and momentum behind this. It makes everyone recognize the important contributions that we are making to the scientific community. It also gives me a lot of inspiration and hope about the kind of motivation for future scientists if these samples can come back. I just talked with a group of high schoolers, and I said, “You all are of the age where you can be the scientists working on these samples.” That’s incredible to me.

This ground-breaking 5 x 60 series for BBC Two and iPlayer tells the astonishing four and a half billion-year story of the planet we call home: Earth. Chris Packham uses the latest science to take viewers on a journey through Earth’s most epic moments – a jaw-dropping catalogue of dramatic upheaval from the first seconds of the planet’s existence to the arrival of its most impactful inhabitants, us.

From massive asteroid bombardments to extreme changes in climate and collisions of whole continents, immersive cutting-edge CGI allows us to witness the critical moments when Earth’s future, and the life it nurtured, hung in the balance.

Each episode tells the story of a pivotal epoch as evolving landscapes and ecosystems faced seemingly insurmountable challenges and breath-taking transitions, including the formation of our life-sustaining atmosphere, the era of lava lakes the size of Australia, and the catastrophic freezing of the entire planet.

This awe-inspiring story can only now be told in such detail thanks to the amazing work of scientists across the world. Our team consulted with over two hundred leading palaeontologists, geologists, climatologists and other specialists, as well scouring thousands of peer-reviewed scientific journals to recreate the landscape and life that existed millions and even billions of years ago. Combined with Chris’s deep knowledge of our contemporary natural world, this epic story illuminates just how special our planet is and shines a new light on the challenges we face today.

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Q&A with Chris Packham

Can you tell me about the series?

The series is essentially a biography of our planet Earth. It highlights the most important aspects of its life to date. It’s not a chronological treatise of its existence. It picks the most important parts of its history and it’s full of surprises. It’s full of fantastic new science. It’s visually exciting. And it tells a great story. One might argue that it’s the greatest story ever told, because our planet is, as far as we know at this point in time, unique in all of the universe and universes, in that it has complex life on it. I think the series’ underlying mission is to lead people with a sense of wonder, and also to an appreciation of just how precious our planet is and, indeed, even our species is.

This series is different from the TV programmes that you usually present. What did attract you to this subject, and why did you want to get involved?

I knew I was going to learn a lot, and I like learning on the job. And this was working with an extraordinary team of people from the BBC Studios Productions’ Science Unit and , of course, all the scientists that they were interacting with. I had a framework of knowledge which understood the nature of the program’s mission. But it was going to be a joy to be able to fill in the gaps. And I learned a lot during the making of it. I liked the scale of the series, the fact that it was big. It was almost so big that it was going to be a challenge to be able to tell that story in a comprehensible way. And I like those sorts of challenges. So there was that. And also I was very keen to explore how the geological aspects of our planet had influenced the living parts, and equally how the living parts had influenced the planet, the geology of the planet. That interplay over billions of years is fascinating. I think it will surprise many of our viewers. So, scale, breath, challenge, opportunity to learn, working with a great team and a global team of scientists, some of whom are giving us information for the first time.

The series is not in the chronological order. Is there a reason why it focused on these key moments?

I think that’s the key thing. It isn’t a chronological history of our planet. It very much focuses upon the most important episodes, the most surprising episodes, all those which we just learned about. And we’ve tried to integrate those. Also we’ve chosen those episodes in our history to show the extremes that the planet has gone through – from being devoid of atmosphere to having a blue sky, from being warm at the Poles to being frozen to the equator. From virtually being covered in trees to being completely barren. From life being only in the sea to life smothering the land. We’ve looked at those extremes and what’s facilitated those amazing changes in the way that the surface of our planet has appeared. It would have been redundant to have done that chronologically. The chronology is unimportant. What’s important is how life has interacted with the geology, geology has interacted with life and has thrown up such, as I say, cataclysmic changes over the period of time.

Are there any moments, any events, or any creatures in the series that really surprised you or you found fascinating?

The idea that plants were trapped in the sea and they couldn’t get out onto the land because there was something fundamental missing, something that we all take for granted. And that was soil. No soil, no roots, no plants – that’s simple. Plants were trapped in the sea and then it was fungi which made it out onto the land, and fungi were the dominant organisms on land. The plants, when they did get out of the sea because the fungi started to help produce soil, then they were subservient to the fungi. The role has been completely reversed today and fungi are completely dependent on plants largely. That was really surprising. And then the other geological thing was that the entire planet froze after complex life had evolved. Virtually the whole planet froze right down to the equator. This was an incomprehensible set back to the evolution of complex life but life didn’t die out. It survived. I think another thing that comes over from the series is the tenacity of life. Whatever this planet has been thrown at, even interplanetary things when the planet has been hit by asteroids, life just doesn’t give up. It finds a means of surviving and prospering, and that’s again very reassuring given that we’re in the process of doing enormous damage to the planet ourselves at this point in time.

I think that, summed up with that point I make at the end of the series, life will continue, whatever happens to us and whatever damage we do, life will continue. I do find that reassuring from my point of view. I love life so much. The idea that, even we in our most abjectly stupid moments seem to have no concern about how much of it we destroy, something will survive. That’s great.

What can we learn by looking at the 4.5 billion history of planet Earth that is relevant to us today?

A few things. Firstly we look at the surface of the planet, and we imagine parts of it are permanent. We look at mountain ranges, big, solid lumps of earth, and we think that’s been there a long time. It’s going to be there a long time, but in fact, it’s not. It’s very transient. The surface of the planet has changed radically numerable times. So the permanence is something that we’ve got to put out of our mind. This is a moment. It’s not going to be like this forever. It hasn’t always been like this. The second thing is the fragility. What we see looking at the Earth history it’s sometimes little tipping points are reached where seemingly minor changes occur which will throw the whole planet into turmoil.

So again, we should appreciate that when we’re messing with the climate in the way that we are at the moment, we don’t have any guarantees that it would just continue to get a bit warmer, a bit warmer, a bit warmer. It might just get a bit warmer, and that might be a bit too much, and then everything changes.

And the last thing is that it won’t be like it’ll change for ten years, and then we can fix it. When we see these changes taking place throughout our planet’s history, it takes millions of years, sometimes hundreds of millions of years, for the planet to recover in the wake of one of those changes. I think it does really throw some light on the fact that we are quite literally playing with fire at the moment. And it’s a very dangerous game. Throughout the programs we focus on the climate, because the climate is very important, always has been, because of its direct impact on life. We nod to the fact that we are harming the climate throughout our first four programs. And in the final program we address it head on. I think it’s a very valid thing to do. This point of now, of making the series, is not the culmination of life on Earth and on our planet’s evolution. It’s just a moment in it, and it has a lot more future to come, and it would be quite good if we could share some of that future, and not mess it up for ourselves.

Anything you’d like viewers to take away from it?

I’d like people to think, wow! What a place! There’s nothing else like it. It’s so unbelievably valuable, we can’t take it for granted in any way, shape or form. Secondly, how utterly astonishing it is given all the topsy turvy, ups and downs, roller coaster history of our planet that that we’ve actually ended up here. Because it was never prescribed. It was a series of change happenings and we’re so fortunate to be here as a species given the capabilities that we have. So, very special planet, very special species, inordinately valuable, the only one we know of anywhere in any universe. We’ve got to look after it. Does our species, not us as individuals, but does our species really want it on its conscious that it messed it all up. I can’t see that we do. We’re not bad organisms. Some individuals are bad organisms, but as a species we’re enormously intelligent, adaptable, creative. We can do wonderful thing. Let’s do them know, let’s focus on the wonderful things and stop doing the bad things.

Episodes

Inferno

In Inferno, Chris Packham explores one of the darkest periods in Earth’s history: the worst mass extinction the planet has ever seen, when as much as 90% of all species died, 252 million years ago. This extraordinary moment in Earth’s history took life to the brink, wreaking havoc and destruction on an unprecedented scale. But somehow, life found a way to bounce back, and a new geological era ushered in the age of the dinosaurs.

The story begins with a massive volcanic eruption: the Siberian Traps eruption lasted for two million years and created enough lava field to cover an area the size of Australia. Life in the immediate vicinity was no doubt vaporized, but the fossil record reveals a bigger mystery – a strange ‘line of death’ in rock formations all over the world that indicates almost all life dying out, no matter how close it was to the lava field. Chris uncovers what the latest science reveals about the aftermath of the eruption, and the terrifying series of events that led to the global mass dying.

It’s a stark cautionary tale of how rapid climate change can cause whole ecosystems to collapse, but the fossil record also hints at Earth’s miraculous powers of reinvention. Chris discovers clues in rocky mountain ranges to one of greatest deluges in the planet’s history – a downpour lasting on and off for almost two million years that transformed conditions and led life to bounce back in extraordinary style, with the rise and eventual domination of the dinosaurs.

Key Facts:

The Permian mass extinction or “Great Dying” lead to 96% of all marine life being wiped out and 70% of all land vertebrates.

The sum total of every living thing on our planet today adds up to less than 1% of those that have ever existed on Earth.

The Siberian Traps eruptions lasted two million years.

It created a lava field that covers over 2.5 million square kilometres (enough to bury the entire continent of Australia hundreds of meters deep).

Global temperatures rose as much as 10 degrees C because of the eruption.

It’s thought toxic halogens destroyed the Earth’s ozone layer.

Snowball

In Snowball, Chris Packham tells the story of the astonishing moment in Earth’s distant past, when almost the entire planet froze – a glistening ‘Snowball Earth’ in the dark void of space. With ice wrapped around the planet to the equator, the chances of life surviving hang in the balance.

Earth’s terrifying journey into the deep freeze started with fire, not ice. 800 million years ago, long before the age of the dinosaurs, before there was even animal life, the giant supercontinent Rodinia broke up. Earth’s vast powerful tectonic forces ripped the land apart, kicking off a series of events that resulted in huge amounts of carbon dioxide being sucked from the atmosphere and sending global temperatures plummeting.

This plunge into the deep freeze couldn’t have come at a worse time. The very first forms of complex life – the ancestors to the amazing life we see around us today – were evolving but, as the planet froze to the equator, it looked like their days were numbered. Happily, Chris discovers that after 50 million years locked in ice, volcanic eruptions drove a great thaw. Life broke free from the ice and soon made a giant leap, from the microscopic, to the first animals big enough to see and touch.

Key Facts:

800 million years ago Earth was dominated by a single continent called Rodinia.

Life was mostly confined to the oceans, as single celled organisms like bacteria.

The tectonics plates under Iceland move apart around one cm every year.

Scientists have discovered microfossils in the Grand Canyon dated to around 700 million years old that show some of the first evidence of predation.

Today ice covers 10% of all land on the planet.

Scientists have found evidence that 700 million years ago ice reached the equator.

Modelling suggests temperatures dropped to minus 70 degrees C.

During this time Earth was trapped in deep freeze periods for as much as 50 million years.

During the rapid melt sea levels rose as much as two metres every 10 years.

Green

In this episode, Chris Packham tells the miraculous story of how plant life turned Earth from a barren rock into a vibrant green world. A four billion year saga of extraordinary highs and lows that almost wiped out all life on the planet.

Four billion years ago Earth was predominantly a water world, lacking land masses, with plant life’s early ancestors trapped on the seabed. Everything changed when a giant asteroid bombardment smashed into the young planet’s crust triggering plate tectonics – Earth’s extraordinary land building force.

As opportunities on land grew, plants faced an epic struggle to establish themselves in a world dominated by giant eight metre fungi, overcoming death and dehydration and eventually creating the life-giving substance that would allow them to prosper: soil.

But just as they seemed set to triumph, evolving into the amazing biological machines that are trees, they became the victims of their own success. Giant swamp forests sprang up, locking up so much carbon dioxide, that global temperatures plummeted sending Earth into one of its most terrifying chapters yet.

Key Facts:

Four billion years ago the Earth didn’t have any continents, just small pockets of volcanic islands.

3.2 billion years ago Earth was bombarded by asteroids – some as much as 60km in diameter (four times the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs). It’s thought these asteroids may have helped trigger plate tectonics.

Granite is 10% less dense than basalt.

1976 NASA launched LAGEOS – The Laser GEOdynamic Satellite, which used a millimetre accurate laser measuring system to track land surface movement measuring how the continental plates move.

Around 500 million years ago plants and fungi teamed up in a symbiotic relationship that allowed the plants to create a permanent foothold on the land.

430 million years ago fungi dominated the landscape.

Prototaxites was a giant fungal spike that towered up to 8 meters high.

450 million years ago there was no soil for plants to use.

400 million years ago the huge spread of plants reduced atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by 25%.

Lepidodendrons – known as ‘scale trees’, could grow to 50 metres in as little as 15 years.

Throughout the 60 million years of the Carboniferous, plants locked away carbon in the form of coal to the tune of 100,000 million tonnes every single year.

Atmosphere

In this episode, Chris Packham tells the almost implausible story of how our world went from a barren rock with a sky of endless black, to the planet we know today, cloaked in the thin blue line of our life-sustaining atmosphere.

When Earth first formed from clouds of dust and gas 4.6 billion years ago, it was – like so many other lifeless worlds in the universe – devoid of an atmosphere, an inhospitable rock floating in the black void of space. But as the young planet was pummelled by asteroids a period of extraordinary upheaval began.

Over a two-billion-year period, the planet faced violent eruptions and a toxic orange haze, vast oceans of water in the sky and seas turning rusty red. Eventually, with the emergence of life and photosynthesis recalibrating the gases in our atmosphere, the stage was set for Earth to become the vibrant azure-skied planet we call home today.

Key Facts:

4.5 billion years ago Earth would have had virtually no atmosphere.

Through volcanic eruptions and outgassing, much of Earth’s atmosphere was released from inside the planet.

The early atmosphere had a thick orange methane and carbon dioxide haze.

At this point the surface of the Earth was completely dry, too hot for water to reach it. But an ocean of water existed suspended in the atmosphere which eventually fell as rain.

Water is thought to be a crucial ingredient for life to form. Around four billion years ago that is exactly what happened.

Three billion years ago microscopic organisms known as cyanobacteria developed the process of oxygenic photosynthesis. Taking sunlight, water and carbon dioxide and turning it to sugars and oxygen.

At first the oxygen was trapped in the ocean – reacting with iron and turning the sea red.

It was only then that oxygen could escape and start to change the atmosphere.

Just over two billion years ago oxygen reacted with methane removing it from the atmosphere, leaving Earth with an azure blue sky.

Human

Today Earth is a human world, home to eight billion people and counting. Humans now have a greater effect in shaping Earth’s surface than many natural processes. In this episode, Chris Packham explores how dramatic twists in Earth’s story enabled humans to go from being part of nature to controlling it, and what we can learn from this epic tale before it’s too late.

The story begins 66 million years ago with the catastrophic impact of the asteroid that wiped out the (Non-avian) dinosaurs. From the ashes of the desolation that followed, a new animal family rose to power. This was adaptable and inventive enough to emerge out of the harsh new world – the mammals. It began with a distant ancestor that shared many traits of the much maligned, but evolutionarily brilliant, rat. Due to a series of extreme geological and climatic events, mammals evolved into early primates feasting in the newly formed tropical rainforests, and then to early humans travelling vast distances between forests in places like East Africa’s Rift Valley.

Earth’s story is a saga spanning 4.5 billion years, but it’s only in the last 11,000 years – with the rise of farming – that our species has started to dramatically impact our planet and its ecosystems. The human chapter of Earth’s story might end in disaster, but Chris is keen to argue for a different ending, where all of humanity’s achievements to date “…were just our dress rehearsals, because in the very near future our species will need to reach the zenith of its achievements and… all humanity will have to learn to put our Earth first.”

Key Facts:

66 million years ago an asteroid the size of Mount Everest crashed into Earth.

Remnants of the creator site can be found in parts of Mexico in the form of geological sink holes known as cenotes. They trace the 110 mile diameter of the inner creator rim.

It’s believed 300 billion tons of sulphur were blasted into the atmosphere. Sulphur reflects sunlight and this triggered a period of darkness and cold with temperatures dropping around 20 degrees C.

The dark and cold lasted for about 10 years.

56 million years ago the Earth had warmed and even in the Arctic temperatures were around 23 degrees C. This warming period is studied by climate change scientists and is known as Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.

34 million years ago the planet cooled again, wiping out primates in the northerly continents of North America and Europe.

The oldest cave art is dated to around 45,000 years ago and found in Sulawesi, Indonesia.

Chris visited the cave of Niaux in Southern France where the art is dated to around 13,000 years ago.

11,000 years ago humans started farming.

Today 40% of the world’s land surface that isn’t frozen is agricultural.

Only 4% of all the mammals alive today are wild animals, 96% are humans, their pets or domestic farm animals.

Human population as risen from 1 billion to 8 billion in just 220 years.

Science

Much of Earth’s 4.5 billion year history is shrouded in mystery, so to make the series the production team scoured the globe to find the latest research and the world’s leading scientists conducting it. The result is a unique collaboration, bringing together research and evidence from a huge range of disciplines for the first time.

The production team worked closely with Prof Andrew Knoll, (The Fisher Professor for Natural History at Harvard University) and consulted with over 200 leading palaeontologists, geologists, climatologists, and other specialists. These experts provided guidance that helped shape the dramatic stories the series tells and they helped create an extraordinary attention to detail that makes the VFX sequence of ancient Earth so compelling.

The experts advised on the anatomical features, behaviour, and ecological interactions of extinct species, as well as the geological processes and climatic conditions of each era. They helped shape the story and the visuals reviewing iterations of our VFX, shot-by-shot through the entire production process – ensuring every frame is informed by the most cutting-edge science.

VFX

Recreating the ancient Earth and the dramatic events that unfolded over 4.5 billion years was an enormous challenge. BBC Studios has an award-winning reputation for creating compelling VFX lead factual series and the production team worked with VFX specialists Moonraker.

The result was 364 shots. A total of 97 mins of photoreal CGI – a full-length feature film.

Over 30 artists worked on the series, and it required a staggering 13647 individual elements rendered to recreate Earth in all its glory.

Earth (5×60) is a BBC Studios Science Unit Production with NOVA and GBH Boston, for the BBC and PBS. It’s an Open University partnership.

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