I’d throw myself in front of [a] T-Rex to be consumed
Chris Packham is not shy about his priorities. He wants to know why things are the way they are. His new show Evolution doesn’t start at the Big Bang or even the first single-celled organism. That’s too boring for this run. Instead Packham picks five famous animals. Elephants. Ostriches. Bats.
He uses them as anchors.
From there he pulls back the thread. Way back. To the last universal common ancestor. He uses CGI to show us the ugly missing links. The stuff usually reserved for dusty textbooks. He hopes people stop just “liking” nature. He wants them to care. It’s a bigger ask. Love is passive. Care is active. It requires work.
No more classroom drudgery 📚
Previous shows like Earth worked because they took insane timelines and made them digestible. Packham and his team want a challenge again. Evolution feels big. Scary maybe. Complex for sure.
They refused to teach it like a school subject. No “cell A becomes cell B”. Boring. Instead they told stories about movement. How animals eat. How they breed. They wanted surprises.
Packham likes it when viewers grab their phones to text friends immediately. Look at this. It works. You have to be surprised. We grow out of curiosity as kids. We forget why the sky is blue. The show brings that back. Not in a childish way but a curious one. It’s joyous.
Consider the bat. 🦇
They eat half their body weight every single night. Insane. How? Ears. The jaw evolved into ear bones so mammals could hear. But in bats those structures are still eating tools. Science connects dots we didn’t know existed. Gills become jaws. Jaws become ears. It clicks.
Packham studied this stuff back when fossils were just gray rocks and theories were static. Now science is moving. Fast. Scientists fight. There are disagreements. Two theories vs another.
The show embraces that mess. It admits we don’t have all the answers. Ambiguity lets the imagination work. Packham enjoys not knowing.
Humans are not the prize 🧠
Here’s the rub. We think evolution is about us. We aren’t.
We are clever. Sure. We build things. But evolution keeps going. Without us. If. With. Life doesn’t care if humans stay or go. We are dependent on it though.
David Attenborough did the heavy lifting. He got everyone to love birds. Now the job is different. Love isn’t enough. The planet is burning. We need to care because we are part of this mess. Ignorance isn’t bliss here. Knowledge builds attachment. If you know how the lung works you save the lungfish.
Deep time is weird 🐟
If Packham had a time machine he wouldn’t visit his wedding. He’d go to the Cretaceous period. He was a fan of T. Rex as a kid. Big teeth. Extinct. Cool. Back then everyone thought it looked like a lizard in different colors. Now? Science has rebuilt it from scratch in 60 years. Faster than it changed in 65 million.
He wants to see the real one. He wants to see the colors.
And yes he’d run into it. Just to see it hunt. He says if it doesn’t break the space-time continuum he’d get eaten. Good way to die. Great tombstone text.
While on set he found real living ancestors. Weirdos. The velvet worm is slimy and strange. He hadn’t seen one until filming. Amazing. Same for the lungfish. People read about them but don’t believe the videos until they do. It looks like a tentacle nightmare but the limbs are articulated. Real bones. A scientist spent two hours explaining it. Probably needed its own hour-long show.
Bring data to the garden 🌿
Packham brings this same rigour to Springwatch. People think it’s just fluffy birds. It isn’t.
He loves the swallow experiment. Researchers let swallows choose nest liners. White or colored? They picked white feathers. 75% of the time. Why? Bacteria break them down into antimicrobials. Better hatch rates. More chicks fly.
That’s better than any fluffy moment. These common backyard birds are making calculated health choices. It changes how you watch them. You look closer. Science gives depth to the ordinary.
Packham wants the same from Evolution. He hopes people feel the luck involved.
We are here on a blue dot by pure chance. A billion tiny decisions. Mutations. Flukes. To wreck that feels stupid. Do we want to?
Evolution starts 13 July. Watch it if you want to rethink your place in the dirt. 🌍
