David Attenborough's Natural Curiosities

Some animals appear to have taken Nature’s gifts and stretched them to extreme limits. With these two natural curiosities one creature, the giraffe, has ended up with a super-stretched neck, the other, the chameleon, a super stretchy tongue. In both cases nature has found a way to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary.

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.

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.

Sir David Attenborough uses this episode to investigate two animals who are capable of true virgin birth - the production of offspring without the need for sex.

This episode explores the story of two animals that hide behind seemingly impregnable coat of arms. Can Sir David Attenborough get in behind their armour and reveal their mysteries?

Sir David Attenborough continues to shine the spotlight on nature's most amazing animals this time looking at the vision in squid and owls. Perhaps not a classic pairing, both owls and squid have incredible adaptations for being able to navigate at night.

Fleas are supposed to be able to jump the equivalent of a human leaping over St. Paul’s Cathedral and cheetahs purportedly can clock speeds of 70 miles per hour. But are these claims really true? The discovery of the world's most elastic natural protein in insects and the development of a hi-tech tracking collar have helped reveal the truth. So can these creatures really achieve what should be physically impossible?

Orangutans can use tools but such skills remained undiscovered for centuries. They were considered as just clever mimics until discovery in remote Sumatran swamps revealed their true potential. Clever crows also make surprisingly sophisticated tools. How have the curious minds of these two animals helped them become so inventive?

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?

Hybrids can be bizarre and they can be deadly. We look at two hybrid animals that owe their existence to human interference – the pizzly bear (a cross between a polar bear and grizzly), which has come into being because of global warming, and the killer bee brought into existence because of the transfer of African bees to South America.

Some animals have an extraordinary ability to find their way. The dung beetle, an insect revered by ancient Egyptians, uses the sun, the moon and even the Milky Way to move its prized ball of dung in the right direction. Pigeons are often considered feeble birdbrains, but they have incredible memories that can recall several complex travel routes with amazing accuracy and they even use manmade roads and hedgerows to find the quickest way home.

The giant panda gives birth to the smallest baby of any mammal and has to care for and protect it for many months. The kiwi lays one of the largest eggs in the bird world, which produces a very well developed chick. Why don’t pandas give birth to more developed, robust young and why do kiwis produce a single egg that is a quarter of its body mass and almost too big to lay?