Secrets of the Dead: Graveyard of the Giant Beasts

Buried beneath the sand for seven million years, a skull is unearthed in Chad that may provide evidence of the oldest known human ancestor.

Discover the evolutionary secrets of some of the world’s most majestic creatures. From voracious crocodiles and acrobatic birds to stupendous whales and majestic elephants, this documentary follows top scientists on a global adventure as they follow clues from the fossil record and change what we thought we knew about the evolution of iconic beasts.

The true story of Homer Hickam, a coal miner's son who was inspired by the first Sputnik launch to take up rocketry against his father's wishes.

A whale existed 5 million years ago. Mark found her skeleton and decided to reassemble the pieces in a dusty basement of the Science Museum in Brussels. A filmmaker found Mark and decided to film him, the whale, and the dust. While these bones are put back together, like pieces from a puzzle, we try to imagine how life was 5 million years ago, a time before humans existed, but the sea and the sun were already here.

Darwin's great insight – that life has evolved over millions of years by natural selection – has been the cornerstone of all David Attenborough’s natural history series. In this documentary, he takes us on a deeply personal journey which reflects his own life and the way he came to understand Darwin’s theory.

This is the story of a mystery dinosaur called jane, who has baffled the greatest minds in paleontology from the moment she was unearthed.

A documentary series from Channel 4, hosted by professor Richard Dawkins, well-known darwinist. The series mixes segments on the life and discoveries of Charles Darwin, the theory of natural selection and evolution, and Dawkins' attempts at convincing a group of school children that evolution explains the world around us better than any religion.

Following the journey of fossils from their discovery in remote corners of the earth to laboratories, museums, auction houses and collectors’ living rooms, the film weaves together interlocking stories of eccentric characters caught between the demands of commerce and the basic human drive to unlock the most profound mysteries of life. THE BONES takes us deep into the Gobi, Sahara, and North American badlands, and through laboratories, museums, high-end auction houses, and grungy hotel rooms at the Tucson gem show. Wrapped in elusive questions about the origins of life on earth, and its potential future demise, THE BONES unearths the deep passions at the heart of the dinosaur world.

It's considered the discovery of the century in Japan -- the unearthing of a complete fossilized skeleton of an 8-meter long dinosaur. It was dubbed Mukawaryu based on the name of the town in Hokkaido where it was uncovered. The find opened up a new world of dinosaur research in Japan. But it also created another mystery because this land dinosaur was discovered in a location that, eons ago, would have been in the ocean. How did the fossil get there? The amazing answer is revealed in this documentary, using CGI to re-create how dinosaurs lived 72 million years ago.

Svalbard is a norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean where the world's northernmost city is situated. It is a place where the underground, terrestrial and spatial universes blend into each other starting from a coal mine up to Venus.

An educational film on unknown microorganisms discovered in the potassium salts of the Permian Sea.

A fascinating documentary, shot in the mountainous north of Burma. No filmmaker is welcome there, because, against the background of a civil war, the jade miners enter the deserted mines illegally. With the aid of filming locals, however, Midi Z was able to compile this portrait. Getting rich quick turns out to be hard and risky work Jade has always been a valuable commodity in Asia. In the mountains in the north of Burma there are valuable deposits of jade. The area forms part of Kachin State, inhabited by many ethnic groups which found themselves embroiled in the Civil War in 2010 with the Burmese government. Jade mining was halted because of the conflict. Thousands of workers, however, went to the war zone in order to dig for illegal jade. It turned the region into a no-go area and the filmmaker Midi Z, who had so far made feature films in Burma, saw no opportunity to go and film there. It was far too dangerous. © iffr.com

How did your body become the complicated, quirky, amazing machine it is today? Anatomist Neil Shubin uncovers the answers in this 3-part science series that looks at human evolution. Using fossils, embryos and genes, he reveals how our bodies are the legacy of ancient fish, reptiles and primates — the ancestors you never knew were in your family tree.

In a race against developers in the Rocky Mountains, paleontologists uncover a unique fossil site packed with astonishingly well-preserved bones of mammoths, mastodons, and other giant extinct beasts. The discovery opens a highly focused window on the vanished world of the Ice Age in North America.

Sir David Attenborough investigates the discovery of a 200 million year old Ichthyosaur on the Jurassic Coast in southern England. Using state of the art technology and CGI David brings the story of the fossilised ichthyosaur out of the rock and shows us what this creature was really like as it lived during the Jurassic time period.