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Life on Earth: The greatest story ever told

WHEN I saw the new edition of Life on Earth by David Attenborough on my desk, I felt an emotional twang. It was like seeing a cherished childhood friend again after decades, or reaching the last chapter of a moving book and feeling you might cry. It鈥檚 not too much to say that the first edition of the book, published 40 years ago, and the TV programmes that accompanied it, changed the lives of millions. I was one of them.

As a child I remember using the book to scare and entertain my younger sister and her friends. I鈥檇 show them a picture of a tarsier, super-cute with gigantic eyes, and then flick to a picture of an open-mouthed crocodile bursting out of a river to attack a wildebeest.

But something about the book also touched us more deeply than that. It offered a window onto a world of incredible life forms, more diverse than we could possibly imagine. The wonder of that revelation stayed with me, and I grew up to become a behavioural ecologist, studying animals.

鈥淩eading the new edition is coloured by the disaster of climate change unfolding since its first appearance鈥�

Years later, I was lucky enough to meet Attenborough, and I told him how he had inspired me as a kid. He nodded jovially: he had heard that line many, many times.

The latest edition of his classic book deserves to inspire another generation. With a revised text and new photographs, it is stunning 鈥� a beautiful and wide-ranging work. The science, too, is thoroughly updated, and Attenborough acknowledges the help of Matthew Cobb, a zoologist at the University of Manchester, UK, in rewriting the text.

Cobb has done a superb job of covering the immense range of discoveries in the intervening 40 years, from Tiktaalik, the species that represents the transition between fish and four-legged land animals, to the Denisovans, the latest 鈥� and extinct 鈥� addition to the human family tree.

Leafing through the book, there are extraordinary images of life. Take the bristlecone pine in Nevada, one of the longest-lived organisms on Earth. It is humbling to think that these trees can live for more than 5000 years. On another page, sand floats down a river like icing sugar as a Nile crocodile descends.

Then there is an amazing photograph of a fossil of a bird-like, ground-dwelling dinosaur from China. It is some 150 million years old, and its feathers are clearly visible in the rock. Until quite recently we didn鈥檛 know that feathers evolved for reasons other than flight, functioning primarily as insulation. Nor did we know that some dinosaurs survived the asteroid impact cataclysm of 66 million years ago, and have become the birds we see today.

The book is heavily biased towards life forms visible to the naked eye, particularly the charismatic vertebrates, those species we can more easily relate to. An objective version would have been mostly about bacteria, among the first and most successful life forms on Earth, but wisely we skip over the microbes quickly to focus on the traditional stars of natural history.

There is a wonderful shot of a sloth in Costa Rica, its fur green with algae, a miniature ecosystem in itself. It is difficult to see the image and not endow the sloth with human qualities. This tendency to anthropomorphise becomes harder still to resist in the chapter on primates. There we see a female chimp using a stick to extract tasty termites from a mound, her offspring tucked under her arm, watching intently.

And there is a magnificent silverback mountain gorilla, an animal closely associated with Attenborough after the famous episode of the Life on Earth TV series that featured him sitting among them. A small omission: the text in the new edition doesn鈥檛 mention that the species is now facing extinction, with around 1000 animals left in the wild.

Things change. Attenborough has become a fully-fledged legend, and his name is almost as big on the book鈥檚 cover as the title. You read it and can鈥檛 help hearing it in Attenborough鈥檚 voice. The emotion I feel reading the new edition is coloured not only by nostalgia for my childhood, but also by the ecological disaster of climate change that has unfolded since its first appearance.

In the late 1970s, a book called Life on Earth could be published purely as a celebration of the extraordinary power of evolution, unashamedly aiming to inspire wonder about the natural world. This edition is still mostly about that: a work of old-school natural history. Only in the fourth paragraph from the end is climate change mentioned 鈥� and then slightly weirdly, when we read that 鈥渢he seas are warming as a consequence of the climatic changes we have caused鈥�.

Attenborough鈥檚 recent Blue Planet II ended with a call for the oceans to be cleared of plastic pollution, and this problem gets a mention here, too. But the role of climate change in threatening large amounts of life on Earth is conspicious by its absence.

鈥淭he breadth of natural history covered in the book is extraordinary and mesmerising鈥�

The desperate extinction rate, and the fact that many scientists consider that we have entered a new geological epoch dominated by human activity, tagged the Anthropocene, is not mentioned. The epilogue talks about extinctions 鈥� of the passenger pigeon, the most numerous bird in history, and the dinosaurs 鈥� but not the ones we are now causing.

I think the epilogue should have laid this out clearly. Attenborough did not mention climate change in his TV series for many years, saying he was cautious about crying wolf until the science was in. But in the last decade or so he has addressed the problem clearly, and it is a shame that he didn鈥檛 do the same in this update to his most famous book.

That quibble aside, the breadth of natural history covered in the book is extraordinary and mesmerising, and for that, Attenborough and his advisor Cobb should be congratulated. Life on Earth is still breathtakingly rich, and we would know far less about it were it not for Attenborough鈥檚 wonderful skills of communication over the years: our cultural and scientific lives would be poorer without him.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淎ttenborough makes an evolutionary leap鈥�