The story of life leaving the oceans and adapting to land is one of the most remarkable evolutions in the history of our planet. The first wave of invaders were lichen and tiny plants, paving the way for animals to be next. The invertebrates, with their tough exteriors, quickly adapted to life on land and have been incredibly successful ever since. These were the first animals to evolve flight and take to the skies.
Then, the vertebrates arrived. Fins became limbs and crocodile-sized amphibious creatures dominated the prehistoric swamps. But the amphibians’ reign was not to last, as conditions on Pangea changed and the vast swamps all but disappeared. One amphibious creature, however, did rise during this time, thanks to an adaptation that set it apart from all others: its egg had a protective membrane that enabled it to survive away from water. From this one common ancestor, all mammals, reptiles, birds and dinosaurs would descend.
This marked the start of two great new dynasties who would clash for supremacy time and again over millions of years – the rivalry between mammals and reptiles had begun. Yet, just as large land animals got going, the Earth threw its most devastating curveball: the third and biggest mass extinction of all time, wiping out more than 90% of life.
Key moments
Lockdown Lichen – Lichen are not one species but several algae/cyanobacteria living amongst many species of fungal filaments, and despite being found on every continent, they are remarkably hard to bring to life on screen. The team set out to film lichen like never before, as if descending into an enchanted forest.
Lichen are very small, but standard macro-photography techniques that are necessary to capture them up close result in a very shallow depth of field. Making the shots feel like flying through the lichen landscape required stitching tens of thousands of macro images together, a painstaking process that made use of powerful software.
When the time came to start collecting and filming lichen, COVID hit and the UK went into lockdown. Luckily, because lichen are so abundant, the team (Richard Kirby, Jolyon Sutcliffe) were able to collect several different species from their gardens and local buildings and transformed their bedrooms, closets, and sheds into mini studios. The still cameras were set running, and a week or so later, once the computer software had worked its magic, the lichen shots started rolling in.
The Largest Millipede in History – Even Morgan Freeman was amazed to learn that millipedes have existed for more than 300 million years! Arthropleura was the largest millipede to have ever walked the land, a real titan of its day at over 2 meters long and half a meter wide. The team worked closely with scientists to create from fossil evidence the most scientifically accurate model yet of this impressive giant arthropod.
COVID restrictions meant the tree fern forests of New Zealand were off limits to the crew, so they instead filmed the backdrops in the largest tree fern forest in the Northern Hemisphere, on Ireland’s West Coast. The ferns were imported from Australia in the mid-19th Century and have adapted well to their home at Kells Bay Botanical Gardens.
Leaping Frogs & Dragonflies in Switzerland – Dragonflies were one of the first animals to evolve flight more than 300 million years ago, marking the beginning for the insects. They have truly stood the test of time as they remain virtually unchanged to this day. Amphibians are their eternal nemeses, for they too evolved hundreds of millions of years ago.
After several years of scouting the perfect location to film these ancient rivals, and almost giving up, the Life on Our Planet team came across a research paper that had some great photos of the action they were looking for. The location: small agricultural pond, on the edge of a field, under the Zurich airport flightpath. After eight hours a day under the scorching sun and in the stinky sludge of the pond, alongside local amateur photographer Beat Schneider, the crew captured for the first time ever the various different hunting techniques that the frogs use to try to outsmart the aerial acrobatics of the dragonflies. High-speed footage which slows the action down revealed the dragonflies employ a barrel roll technique, rolling sideways to avoid the lunging frog, and then taking off vertically to escape. True masters of flight!
First Steps on Land – Paleontologist Per Ahlberg’s work helped the team home in on the best creature to showcase the moment when our vertebrate ancestors first stepped out of the water and onto land, a moment that in reality happened very gradually over millions of years. When lobe-finned fish made it to shore using their strong and highly mobile front fins, they were met there by the fish-eating tetrapod amphibians who got there first — some of which had grown to over 3 meters long.
Caddo Lake in Texas was chosen for this scene’s primeval swamp setting. With just one week to film the background plates for the scene, the crew spent a day searching miles of cypress shorelines before they found just one exposed sand bank with an epic backdrop behind it. They were all set to start filming the next day when a thunderstorm erupted that would last all day and night – and completely flooded their beach. With only three days left to shoot, the heat was on to find an alternate site. After some careful gardening and sand rearrangement they made it work, shooting the epic moment when the fish took its first steps out of the water and first breathed in air.
Gorgonopsid – Though they pre-dated the dinosaurs by about 35 million years, Gorgonopsid looked equally as monstrous and frightening. The apex predators of their time, they are precursors to the mammals, living alongside and hunting the precursors to the reptiles. Gorgonopsids were the first known group of animals to evolve saber-like teeth, a trait that would turn up five more times throughout life’s history due to convergent evolution.
Lystrosaurus – Despite its odd looks and impish nature, Lystrosaurus would one day come to inherit the earth. A small pig-like creature with a remarkable story to tell, Lystrosaurus is yet another underdog that would one day flourish.
Lystrosaurus was the first VFX sequence designed for the series, a test run of how to best pre-visualize the story before shooting backplates. Many methods were employed, from plastic toys and bits of paper representing trees and water, to a day spent in ILM’s high-tech studio with actors in motion-capture suits moving cardboard boxes around an empty space. ILM had to alter the way they designed their assets to make sure that they could hold up to the extra scrutiny brought about by natural history’s longer shots and bigger close ups.
The backplates for the Gorgonopsid-meets-Lystrosaurus scene were filmed in La Palma, part of the Canary Islands. A landscape with no grass featuring black volcanic earth and pine trees with red bark gave it a very prehistoric feeling. Little did the crew know they were sitting on a volcano that would erupt a year later, almost to the day.
The Great Dying – Chapter 3 ends with the most devastating mass extinction event of all time, the Permian Mass Extinction, which killed off 90% of all species that ever lived. With an eerie resonance to what we are doing to the planet today, a rise in carbon dioxide levels was to blame. Over a period of tens of thousands of years, volcanic activity in what is now Siberia released six times more carbon dioxide than is in our atmosphere today. This triggered ten degrees of global warming and all the climate devastation that comes with it. Entire branches were wiped off the evolutionary tree, lost forever. The future of all life hung by a thread.
Luckily for the team, an Icelandic volcano erupted during the filming period. COVID restrictions meant that Iceland, usually full of tourists, was empty, and the crew got incredible access to the volcano. Wearing Sulfur dioxide alarms, which did on one occasion go off, and with lumps of molten lava raining down on them as they left, they captured footage that would be used throughout the series. It was the first time drones had covered an eruption in such proximity.