David Attenborough's Natural Curiosities

Salamanders can regenerate entire legs and tails to replace ones they have lost, while deer shed their massive antlers and re-grow them from a few remaining cells each year. How do these creatures regenerate entire body parts and why is it not possible for all animals to do the same?

Humans are not alone in using medicines against injuries and infection. Some animals protect themselves with natural remedies in the most extraordinary ways. Hippos produce a blood-red “sweat” that acts as a sunblock and helps fight infections, while capuchin monkeys rub themselves with insect-repellent leaves to protect against insect bites.

The blue whale and the flamingo both have bodies determined by their diet. Blue whales grow enormous by feeding on tiny shrimp-like creatures, while flamingos spend their lives eating with their heads upside down. Both are oddities in their own groups and yet both are curiously similar.

The bodies of some animals stretch and shrink in extraordinary ways. The anaconda can swallow prey twice its own body size - and then wait for over a year until their next meal. The camel’s curious hump can almost double in weight giving it the energy to travel huge distances across deserts. What is the secret behind these expandable bodies?

"Magical Appearances" explores how swallows magically appear each spring and asks how did complex and beautiful insects like butterflies suddenly arrive in the summer. The discovery of the swallow’s epic migration and the revelation that butterflies could metamorphose into totally different looking adults were scientific stories both cloaked in mystery and controversy.

"Strange Parents" asks how we usually recognise animals as either male or female and how each sex normally plays a particular role in their own life cycle. However both hyenas and seahorses completely break the gender rules.

We'll find out how nature is incredibly inventive and has produced two unique mechanisms of natural construction that have fascinated scientists for centuries; weaving in birds and silk.

In this episode we explore the remarkable adaptations of two creatures that have evolved to survive the most challenging of conditions and seem to defy the laws of nature.

Zebra stripes vary subtly between the different species but there is one group of animals that has evolved colourful patterns of seemingly infinite variety, the butterflies. In this episode David looks at two examples of animal patterns that have bedazzled and baffled science for a long time, and uses modern tools to unlock their secrets.

The single spiral tusk of the narwhal inspiration for tales of unicorns and the myriad variations on the twist of the snail shell have delighted and fascinated naturalists and artists since the dawn of civilization.

David encounters two examples where Nature has tinkered with the aging process to alarmingly different effect – the first grows old while trapped in a young body while the second looks old from birth but might hold the key to a long life.

David discovers the curiosities that have led to accusations of forgery but have ultimately helped us rethink evolution. When early explorers brought the first specimen of a duck-billed platypus back to England in 1799, it was thought so bizarre it was deemed a hoax, while the midwife toad became the centre of a raging scientific storm in the 1920s that led to accusations of fakery.