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The incredible story of life's epic, four-billion-year journey on Earth comes alive in this series from Steven Spielberg and the team behind "Our Planet." Stars. Morgan Freeman. Israfeel Ahamed. See production info at IMDbPro.
- (5.8K)
- 2023-10-25
- Documentary
- 60
Oct 24, 2023 · Published: October 24, 2023 11:13am EDT. Netflix’s beautifully realised historical biography of life certainly has ambition. Perhaps 4 billion species have existed in as many years of Earth’s...
Life on Our Planet is an American television nature documentary series released on Netflix and produced by Amblin Television and Silverback Films. Executive-produced by Steven Spielberg and narrated by Morgan Freeman, the series focuses on the evolutionary history of complex life on Earth.
- Overview
- Official Description
- Synopsis
- Animals featured
- Errors
- Trivia
Chapter 1: The Rules of Life is the first episode of Life On Our Planet. It covers the origin of life and the rules of evolution, serving as a showcase of the series' highlights.
"Evolution. Competition. Mass extinction. Three fundamental rules have driven the rise and fall of life on Earth for over four billion years."
The episode opens with a pair of Smilodon gracilis, 2 million years before the present day in North America. The two saber-toothed cats approach a lakeside, where they begin stalking the giant terror bird Titanis. Morgan Freeman states that both sides are armed and prepared for a fight: "This is the story of the great battles for survival and the dynasties that would take over the world. This is the story of life."
The scene cuts to the present day, where marine vertebrates of different evolutionary origins are featured attacking a shoal of fish as a team. Sharks are "living fossils, virtually unchanged for hundreds of millions of years", dolphins and whales are mammals whose ancestors once roamed the land, and birds are the last-surviving dinosaurs. There are over 10 million species of plants and animals alive today, but they are only 1% of all the species that have ever existed. It is then stated that life came from the LUCA (last universal common ancestor) and eventually began flourishing in the oceans.
Simple life forms then gave way to multiple dynasties, with the rule of each dynasty becoming "vanquished" by the next. Invertebrates gave rise to amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs, and finally to mammals. The three "rules of life" are described. The first rule is that the best adapted will always win through. This is represented by an evolutionary arms race between caterpillars and plants.
The next rule of life is that competition drives adaptation. The episode switches back to 2 million years ago, where a male Titanis is shown patrolling his territory by the lakeside. A younger terror bird arrives, wanting to claim the territory for himself. The older male approaches the newcomer and the two birds begin a displaying battle, in which the two sides coordinate their movements in a dance-like performance to assess each other's strength. Neither side backs down, but before a full out fight can happen, the Smilodon pair attack and bring down the younger male. The remaining Titanis looks on as the saber-tooths kill the other terror bird with a bite to the neck. Freeman explains that "the Smilodon's mammalian cunning was one reason terror birds went extinct".
Although numerous mass extinction events throughout our planet's history have caused at least three quarters of life to die out each time, there was one period when Earth was stable for over a hundred million years which allowed the dinosaurs to rise to power. The scene transitions to 76 million years ago, focusing on the hadrosaur Maiasaura. A mother Maiasaura is featured leaving a large herd of other dinosaurs to get to nesting grounds. She goes through a gauntlet of defensive mothers and their nests before making it back to her own nest where her babies are waiting. The mother feeds her young with regurgitated vegetation, in a very bird-like way. She will continue to protect them in the nest for many months until they are big enough to join the rest of the herd.
The next segment focuses on the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago. A female Triceratops is feeding at the edge of a forest when a Tyrannosaurus mother and her two youngsters launch an ambush from through the trees. The horned dinosaur manages to outrun the adult and hold off the faster juveniles before making it back to the safety of the herd. The Triceratops group form an impenetrable wall with their horns, forcing the predatory dinosaurs to retreat. All non-avian dinosaurs would die out after a meteor smashed into the Earth, allowing birds and mammals to form the next global dynasty. This is represented by numerous African animals gathering at a watering hole. The third rule of life states that mass extinctions cause chaos and the fall of dynasties.
Prehistoric animals•Smilodon gracilis (first appearance)
•Titanis (first appearance)
•Maiasaura (first appearance)
•Triceratops (first appearance)
•Tyrannosaurus (first appearance)
Brief cameos•Alamosaurus
•Smilodon gracilis was much smaller than Titanis, which was over twice as heavy and tall as the saber-toothed cat. Due to this, it is highly unlikely that Smilodon preyed upon the terror bird. The larger species of Smilodon that would probably have been capable of taking on Titanis, such as S. populator, didn't evolve until after Titanis died out.
•Likewise, Smilodon and other carnivorous mammals did not drive the terror birds to extinction. South American terror birds such as Phorusrhacos had already died out long before the American continents collided, and Titanis was the only genus to make the trip up to North America. Titanis successfully coexisted with many mammalian predators for millions of years, and it is more likely that it died out due to climate change.
•The creators behind this documentary openly admit that many of the designs for the creatures (ex. Titanis, Tyrannosaurus) were more focused on being appealing to audiences (notably, looking scary) rather than being scientifically accurate. Meaning that a number of animals presented are visually inaccurate to how they would've been in real life.
•The Tyrannosaurus has too many teeth packed together in the front of the Maxilla region in the skull.
•Life is continuously mentioned throughout the series as a "war" between "dynasties" to "dominate the Earth". This is in fact inaccurate as there is no one dominant species on the planet, and no one animal group is "superior" to another. It is stated that mammals now rule the earth, but this cannot be enforced reliably as there are more invertebrates, birds, and fish in the world than mammals.
•The environments that Titanis lived in encompassed dense, forested areas. This sharply contrasts with the open plain-like habitat that the terror bird was depicted in.
•In a brief scene during the fight between two Titanis, the younger male is shown looking back at the older male, moving its eyeball to do so rather than turning its head, nearly looking behind it. In most bird species, bird irises are fixed in place with very limited movement, 10 to 20 degrees at best so their eyes aren't able to turn that far when the head is stationary (although some species of passerines are able to move their eyes 80 degrees). It's impossible to say though, if a terror bird's eyes were able to move to that degree.
•The caterpillar scene was filmed in Ecuador. The caterpillar and plant showed in the episode were Heliconids and passion vines respectively.
•Painstaking research went into constructing the T.rex scene so that it showed off its strengths in a world where its prey was frequently armored to the hilt. Fossil trackways of T.rex suggest that the kind of ambush strategy featured did happen. The sequence was filmed on military land in the UK to allow the crew to drive at the high speed the chase required. However, it meant that Industrial Light & Magic had to transform what amounted to a parking lot into a large meadow.
•Although the T.rex in the episode was identified as a female, it had the red face scales of the male T.rex in Chapter 5: In the Shadow of Giants, while the female in that episode did not have them.
Professor Hazen summarizes the course by reviewing three plausible scenarios for the origins of life: (1) life began with metabolism; (2) life began with a self-replicating strand of some genetic molecule; (3) life began as a cooperative chemical phenomenon, arising between metabolism and genetics.
The timeline of the evolutionary history of life represents the current scientific theory outlining the major events during the development of life on planet Earth. Dates in this article are consensus estimates based on scientific evidence, mainly fossils.
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Season 1. From Protozoa to the stewards of the Earth. Journey across the eons to examine where life on Earth came from and where it might lead. 2023 4 episodes.
