David Attenborough — Life on Earth

The book David Attenborough wrote alongside Life on Earth, his thirteen-part natural history series for the BBC, first shown in 1979.

Across thirteen chapters, from The Infinite Variety to The Compulsive Communicators, he follows some three thousand million years of evolution, from one-celled organisms to human beings. Rather than try to cover every creature, he picks out the most important line of development through each major group of animals and plants, setting living species beside extinct fossil forms. Colour photographs run throughout.

The series behind it took three years to make, with filming at more than a hundred locations around the world. This is the original edition, published by Collins with the BBC; the text came back in 2018 in a new edition with fresh photographs.

Collins / BBC, 1979. 319 pages, hardcover. Second hand.