Your Inner Fish is a well made television style documentary, three episode series. Episode 1 – Your Inner Fish, Episode 2 – Your Inner Reptile and Episode 3 – Your Inner Monkey. All three episodes are entertaining, informative, and offer a trip through time going back to when prehistoric fish swam in the oceans and animal life on dry land apparently didn’t exist. The story delves into areas of research that have changed what was thought to be true up until now.
The Your Inner Fish series is one from which everyone can learn. The documentary presents facts and offers evidence to support the ideas explored. In addition to Neil Shubin, a Fish Paleontologist, a number of well know specialists in related areas are interviewed or are followed as they go from lab to remote locations to do their work of scientifically exploring the origins of the human primate. Paleontology, Anatomy, Biology and other disciplines are relevant, important contributors to understanding human evolution.
Your Inner Fish, Episode 1 begins about 375 million years ago when the fish that crawled out of the oceans gave humans the genetic start of arms, legs, necks and lungs. These elements can be found in our DNA today. In a later episode the amazing role of fingers in primate evolution is explored.
Episode 2 – Your Inner Reptile starts about 200 million years ago, when fierce, reptile like creatures, before the dinosaurs, roamed the earth as they evolved into shrew-like mammals. Modern humans inherited many body parts including skin, teeth and ears going back to this time.
Episode 3 – Your Inner Monkey looks at the primate evolution of which humans are one separate line that evolved differently than other primates even though humans shared a common starting point a hundred million years ago. Brain development in primates is looked at as well has other aspects of development like how important seeing in color and walking on two legs is to evolution.
Your Inner Fish is based on the book by host Neil Shubin, who provides the documentary with understandable commentary and sense of wonder as the film moves across the world searching for fossils and traces of creatures that lived three hundred and fifty million years ago on the planet Earth. If you would like to know what makes a Paleontologist or Anatomist excited then this is the documentary for you. The good news is that their excitement is contagious, understandable and enlightening.
The documentary makes use of wonderful animation and graphics that bring extinct species to life as part of the documentary itself. Graphics are used to help explain many aspects of the research and process of proving theories and ideas on evolution.
Directed and Produced by Tom Cook, David Dugan and Alex Tate. PBS April 2014.
Review by J R Martin, author Create Documentary Films, Videos and Multimedia and documentary filmmaker.
Available on Netflix and on DVD. Each episode is about one hour in length.
Trailer
Links to Amazon, purchase Book or DVD
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