Inside Nature's Giants - Kangaroo

When you read the title of this entry, your first reaction might be bewilderment. Kangaroos are among nature's giants? Well, yes and no. The largest kangaroos on record, who stood at an impressive ten feet tall, went the way of the dodo a long time ago, so their present-day descendants are not as impressive as you may expect. Still, kangaroos today are the largest living marsupials, so that helps them qualify.

But you've already come to love this documentary series full of fascinating lessons on evolutionary biology, so why are we quibbling on technicalities when we can just enjoy the awesome and truly surprising lessons in evolution that studying these and other lovable Australian animals (marsupials like wallabies and koalas, and monotremes like the platypus) can teach us?

Bet you weren't expecting to see what a young Joey looks like, huh?

And in case you're curious about the plural of platypus... it's either platypus or platypuses, but not platypi (you'd have to know a little bit of Latin to understand why).

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Inside Nature's Giants - The Camel

I've never thought much of camels, what with their lenky legs, their weird humps and simultaneously pretentious and dumb-looking ruminant mouths, I never thought these were interesting animals, but watching this documentary about them absolutely blew my mind!

As the team prepares to dissect one specimen, the main question guiding the exploration concerns how it is that these large animals have evolved to put up with the scorching heat of the desert, as well as with its scarcity of water. And when conditions are tough, that's exactly when evolution reveals itself to be that wise blind watchmaker capable of seemingly miraculous solutions that go way beyond anything you could have ever expected.

So join the team to explore the camel's anatomy and physiology, as well as its incredible evolution, as they travel to one of the most camel densely populated regions in the world: Australia. Say what???

Want more? Check out the entire Inside Nature's Giants series.

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Inside Nature's Giants - The Big Cats

Their loud and guttural roars can send chills up and down your spine, even from great distances. If they're running for you, and you're not protected by some sort of fence, you're dinner. If giraffes, crocodiles, zebras, wildebeests and elephants all succumb to these cats' strong jaws and sharp teeth and claws, you don't stand a chance.

Lions and tigers are the largest felines in the world, and becoming top predators has required the development of some impressive adaptations.

Continuing with the Inside Nature's Giants series, the team dissects a lion and a tiger to understand the details of the anatomy and physiology of the hunt, starting with a dissection of the larynx (which produces those frightening roars), and making their way to understand their retractable claws, their muscular bodies and their powerful jaws and sharp teeth.

And while dissecting a tiger is basically enough to get a decent understanding of their evolutionary success, lions are a different story, particularly because their survival depends upon social cohesion and cooperation, since it is not unusual for them to have to take down some massive pray that no single lion could do on his/her own. But their strict social hierarchies also have some disturbing consequences...

Watching these documentaries helps me realize that I would not survive in the wild...

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Inside Nature's Giants - Polar Bear

Continuing with their exploration of the anatomy and physiology of the giants of nature, the team travels to the North Pole in search of a polar bear: the largest land mammalian predator in the world. Because of the difficulties of finding polar bears at all, never mind fresh carcasses, this episode requires the collaboration of a local hunting community whose survival depends on using every last scrap of these animals without wasting anything. And because of the weather conditions, every move is a race against the freezing clock.

Now, the first and most obvious question is just how these bears manage to withstand the intense freezing temperatures of their natural habitat. The answer, it turns out, and this should throw you for a loop, is that a polar bear is a black animal with transparent fur that looks (but isn't) white. Yeah, I was floored too.

But that's not the whole story. We also get to understand, among other things, exactly why there are polar bears to begin with and how they manage to cope with diets that would literally kill us.

Did you see the polar bear attacking that walrus that was probably twice its size?!?

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Inside Nature's Giants - Giant Squid

It wasn't uncommon just a few centuries ago for sailors to tell tales of gigantic sea monsters whose tentacles would crush entire ships. Jules Verne's version of this monster as it attacked Captain Nemo's Nautilus is probably a good example of the kind of thing many people used to believe. Now, while it might be possible for giant squids to really be as large as those old accounts, the largest documented case, as far as I know, puts these creatures at 18 meters in length (59 feet) with a 5 meter mantle (16.4 feet). It may not compare to the tales of old, but I'm certainly impressed.

In today's installment of the fascinating documentary series Inside Nature's Giants, our intrepid scientists get their hands on a beautiful deep-water specimen and attempt to understand its anatomy, physiology and evolutionary history. The secrets hidden inside the body of this and other related creatures are a testament to the ingenuity of the evolutionary process. Forget the aliens of science fiction... reality kicks their ass.

Check out a battle to the death between a shark and an octopus

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Unintelligent Design - The Giraffe's Laryngeal Nerve

The complexity and intricacy of the bodies of living organisms seems like the epitome of science and art coming together in an explosion of perfection. But that appearance is deceiving, and it has given rise to the popular but erroneous belief that such delicacy must be the inevitable result of design and foresight on the part of some intelligent designer.

When you look at the details a bit more closely, however, what you start to notice is that what these bodies actually show is the accumulation of historical antecedents that have gradually evolved over eons of time, and that no intelligent designer would design such systems... unless he were inept.

As you'll see in the following example of the giraffe's recurrent laryngeal nerve (which can be traced back to our fishy ancestors), and as Richard Dawkins explains in this clip from the Inside Nature's Giants documentary series, evolution is not so much a designer (who can always go back to the drawing board and start from scratch) as a tinkerer (who only gets to slightly modify what's already there).

But of course, even the giraffe would not have had the longest recurrent laryngeal nerve...

That would be what, 30 feet to connect two spots that are only inches apart?

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