Life on Our Planet [2023] - My Review and Interesting Notes on Evolution

Review:

 This is probably the only series that I’ve watched at 1.5x speed and yet it felt like a normal one.

Thankfully, the narrator was Morgan Freeman else it would’ve been a very boring series altogether for its sluggish storytelling.

Though it still felt like attending a biology class for the most part, the creators tried their level best to make it as interesting as possible by adding some introduction BGMs with fights within the species and how they evolved which added value to the storytelling.

The creators intentionally presented it in a non-linear way assuming to make it interesting but it only causes confusion since human brains are not designed to think millions of years back & forth it feels like Steven Spielberg likes the dinosaurs so much for his success depends on it so he keeps going back to the dinosaurs period again & again.

I was expecting some theory & visuals of how human life was created & evolved but nothing related was shown.

Overall, it’s a must-watch for those who wish to know the evolution of our world to gain an understanding of how life evolved which gives a broader perspective from our mundane day-to-day life which keeps us within the smaller world with selfish thought processes.

These are some of the notes that I had to take while watching the series [I do this note-taking rarely, only for those interesting ones with so many interesting facts in it]:

EP1: [18-Mar-2025]

4 billion years ago = with lightning, LUCA the tiny single living cell formed, the last universal common ancestor

450 million years ago = invertebrates occupied the oceans & plants occupied the lands first but invertebrates took over, then came the amphibians but they were bound to the water bodies, then came the reptiles with no such bonds and were able to exploit the driest regions, from the reptiles came the dinosaurs who ruled for over 150 million years, then came the mammals 

Rules of life:

The best adapted will win through

Competition drives adaptation

Earth never remains stable for long

EP2 - The first frontier: [19-Mar-2025]

2.4 billion years ago = Photosynthesis - plankton emitting oxygen to make the planet a living space, it made the planet hostile by producing oxygen for nearly 2 billion years

530 million years ago = Jellyfish were the first animals to escape the sea floor and swim

508 million years ago = trilobites/anthropods with armours, the ancestors of insects spiders & crabs

468 million years ago = Arandaspis, an early kind of fish that gave rise to vertebrates like amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds

445  million years ago = frozen undersea, the world’s first mass extinction, the freeze was caused by a 60% drop in CO2, the first ice age which lasted for 200K years causing 85% of all life, Cephalopods thrived, the deep sea predators

444  million years ago = CO2 level regained, temperatures raised, half the planet’s ice had melted, 

374 million years ago = Devonian period, the rise of sharks, 

360 million years ago = a surge in the ocean’s nutrients caused an increase in plankton’s population on a huge scale, it led to the ocean’s oxygen plummeting leading to mass extinction, the world’s 2nd largest extinction, only a few including the early sharks survived, 80% of marine life was gone, the nutrients that caused the extinction were carried from the land released by plants while greening the planet earth, 

252 million years ago = amniotes spread across Pangea. Scutosaurus, weighing over a ton, the first giant plant eater, 

EP3 - Invaders of the land: [19-Mar-2025]

500 million years ago = lichen, neither a plant nor an animal, a combination of fungi & algae, they broke down rocks and produced the first ever soil, paving the way for plants to take over, plants grew & took over the land but then had to start growing vertical fighting for access to life, redwoods are the tallest living things that ever existed and are one among the 400K species of plants

345 million years ago = the first animals to ever set foot on land were arthropods relative to the trilobites, oxygen levels were 60% higher than today’s levels, wings evolved in arthropods to fly from their predators, today there are more than a billion insects for a human, insects are the most abundant group of animals on earth

310 million years ago = fish were able to breathe air to live on land, the evolution from fins to limbs, and the age of amphibians had begun, today there are more than 8K species of amphibians(frogs, etc), amphibians tied to the water(a nice scene of a frog climbing a huge tree)

300 million years ago = during the Carboniferous period earth’s great land masses merged giving birth to the supercontinent Pangea, lacking water most amphibians struggled which led to an evolution where its egg developed a protective shell that held its embryo in its own private pool of fluid inside which the young developed safely without drying out, the tie to water was broken by this amniotic egg known as amniotes that could colonise the dry land, which is the ancestor of all mammals, reptiles, birds and dinosaurs, an area half the size of US lost to lava, the eruptions release noxious gases which combined with water, a cocktail of acid rain pour down poisoning the ground and CO2 in the air, the volcanos released 6 times more CO2 than it is in our atmosphere today triggering 10 degrees of global warming leading to climate devastation, oxygen level plummeted which was the planet’s 3rd mass extinction, 90% of all species lost forever

EP4 - In cold blood : [20-Mar-2025] 

252 million years ago = at the start of the Triassic period, Fungi became the dominant life form on earth, desert reptiles eat insects that desalinates the deadliest salt water from the ground up

248 million years ago = the age of reptiles

150 million years ago = 

234 million years ago = 

210 million years ago = 

152 million years ago = the Jurassic would rule for more than 150 million years, the age of dinosaurs

EP5 - In the shadow of giants: [18-Mar-2025 and again on 20-Mar-2025] 

200 million years ago = dawn of Jurassic period

152 million years ago = the biggest animals to ever walk on the earth, Allasaurs were the predators in that age, plant reproduction revolution: the flower - the giant water lily whose sole purpose is to attract an insect to pollinate by producing scents, 

About 130 million years ago, the flowers made the world colourful

Spiders have been there for over 100 million years weaving webs to catch flies

110 million years ago = theropods could be active day & night, termites/ants the super socializers (a good ant fights scene), ants heal others using the antibiotics in their saliva, earth’s shifting tectonic plates continued to reshape the planet, upwelling of magma increased the sea levels and it flooded the land creating numerous seas/continents with their own climate/character

76 million years ago = small mammals(rabbits), snakes, [mammals vs reptiles again]

66 million years ago = dinosaurs dance moves and romance scene, ends with a cataclysmic event

EP6 - Out of the ashes: [20-Mar-2025] 

66 million years ago = an asteroid, the size of Mount Everest tumbled towards Earth at 100K Km unleashing the power of a billion atomic bombs triggering chain reactions: thermal radiations that destroy all living things surrounding several thousand km, seismic shock waves around the world, earthquakes, tsunamis, within an hour debris ejected into space, is pulled back by earth’s gravity on re-entry it turns red-hot on the ground it’s like standing under a 400-degree grill slowly cooking animals alive, in 2 hours the choking dust enveloped half the planet, trees burnt; survivors were: arthropods, sharks & many life forms that were fed upon the dead bodies of other beings, when the dust clouds were gone, the insects were some of the first to emerge, cocoons, reptiles, the amphibians, the avian dinosaurs, I.e., birds, the last remaining branch of the dinosaur family tree

160 million years ago = shows the birth of dinosaurs with wings, the ancestors of birds

The flamingos, the owl intro scene hunting & eating mammals, the tropical rainforest habitat built by flowers & insect pollinators, and the hummingbirds evolved to hover just like insects beating their wings 80 times per second

20 million years ago = terror bird hunting down a goat-like animal

16 million years ago = tropical reefs, sharks, turtles, new kinds of fish, and sea birds could dive into the water to catch their prey at 90kmph, dinosaurs never conquered the sea but their aviation descendants found a way, penguins, the swimming birds, the rise of the mammals(tigers shown hunting down the terror birds)

EP7 - Inheriting the Earth: [23-Mar-2025]

Mammals feeding their babies with milk

A monkey found a way to open a shell to have its food, a female monkey was shown turning her tail into a sponge to extract water from a deep place, monkey identified an insect repellent by rubbing citrus fruit over their body, 

34 million years ago = Antarctica formation, 2 male giant animals megaceros shown fighting for their female mate, after lands dried up, grasses covered 1/5th of the land, grass-eating zebras with huge bellies, ca cheetah chasing a calf, 

2 million years ago = a giant armadillo, the size of a car, slow but with a huge body and a lethal tail, [50 million years ago crashing of India & Asia formed the Himalayas, 2500 km long, 9 km high and still growing], snow leopards, bats

2.5 million years ago when the cold intensified starting a new ice age came another dangerous mammal

EP8 - Age of ice and fire: [23-Mar-2025]

The story of the great freeze. 

Yellowstone is the coldest place in America, Bisons, and wolves live in cold

2.5 million years ago = cold, snowflakes formed with no 2 the same

20,000 years ago = the northern hemisphere was cold & full of ice, lions hunting elephants in the cold, deserts doubled in size in the southern hemisphere, and Baboons shared 94% of DNA with us

16,000 years ago = ice started to melt, global temperatures began to rise, 100 metres of dust tsunamis, 

11,700 years ago = Holocene period, warm & wet conditions prevailed and average global temperatures fluctuated in 1-degree range, we/humans hunted like wolves(a scene showing humans hunting bisons making them fall off of a cliff), by the end of holocene: humans had spread from Africa to all the other continents and become the world’s most dangerous predator, agriculture to have stable food supply, our ancestors domesticated animals too, farmers, more complex works, civilisations born, agriculture revolution, industrial revolution, wild are tamed or lost, CO2 we release is heating our planet faster than anytime in the last 500 million years, in the last 50 years alone, wildlife population has dropped by more than 70% for which humans are responsible instead of the mass extinction like before, we’re the first species of this planet to understand how it works and also the first specifies to understand what is needed to put it right, our intelligence has brought us this far, how we act now will determine the next story of life, if there’s one thing we’ve learned from the past: it’s that life has always found a way.