Palaeontology

In the Land of the Cave Bear, Alice ventures to the parts of the northern hemisphere, hit hardest by the cold - Europe and Siberia. High in the mountains of Transylvania, a cave sealed for thousands of years reveals grisly evidence for a fight to the death between two staving giants, a cave bear and a cave lion. Yet Alice discovers that for woolly rhinos and woolly mammoths, the Ice Age created a bounty. The Mammoth Steppe, a vast tract of land which went half way round the world, provided food all year round, for those that liked the cold. It was these mammoths that Europe's most dangerous predators hunted for their survival.

Even after thousands of years of ice crushing the northern hemisphere and temperatures of 20 degrees lower than those of today, many of the great giants of the ice age still walked the earth. It was only when the world had warmed up again that mammoths, woolly rhinos, sabre-toothed cats, giant ground sloths and glyptodonts finally became extinct. Professor Alice Roberts sets off on her last voyage back to the Ice Age to discover why.

Sir Attenborough's journey begins in a forest near his childhood home in Leicester, where a fossil discovery transformed our understanding of the evolution of complex life. Travelling to the fog bound coastline of Newfoundland and the Australian outback, Sir Attenborough unearths the earliest forms of animal life to exist on Earth. These bizarre and wonderful creatures are brought to life with the help of cutting edge scientific technology and photorealistic visual effects. From the first animal forms that moved to the first mouths that ate, these were creatures that evolved the traits and tools that allow all animals, including ourselves, to survive to this day.

This series illuminates unique and bizarre evolutionary journeys that have brought forth some of the world’s most impressive animals. We unearth a 50-million-year-old mystery mammal sought out a new source of food in the water, starting a spectacular evolutionary journey so that today it looks like a fish. How did a creature built for land become master of the ocean?

Journey through the long-vanished corners of prehistoric North America, beginning when man first entered the vast, unspoiled continent some 14,000 years ago, in this appealing BBC documentary. Witness ancient beasts, mammoths, mastodons, giant bears, and sabre-toothed cats, and see the legacies each has passed to their modern successors. Computer animation and digital effects bring to life mammoths, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, short-faced bears, glyptodonts, and a plethora of smaller animals in a lush Ice Age mosaic. Discoveries from sites across America are the basis for the reconstructions.

After eight grueling years of hunting in the hot, wind-scoured desert of central Africa, an international team of researchers has uncovered one of the most sensational fossil finds in living memory: the well-preserved 7 million years old skull of a chimp-size animal, probably a male, that doesn't fit any known species. According to paleontologist Michel Brunet of the University of Poitiers in France, whose team reported the find in Nature last week, there is no way it could have been an ape of any kind. It was almost certainly a hominid — a member of a subdivision of the primate family whose only living representative is modern man.