Sutherland, Stuart
Summary: "Do you like history, perhaps investigating where your family came from or learning what challenges your ancestry met and where they called home? This course traces some of the wanderings of our wider family, the biosphere, from its first appearance on Earth around 4 billion years ago through to the present day. This journey has been a fantastic one, with many interesting twists and turns along...
Format: moving image
Publisher / Publication Date: 2013
Copies Available at Woodmere
2 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 570 NEWCall number: DVD 570 NEW
Summary: 160 million years ago, a massive lava flow in China's Junggar Basin resulted in an eerily preserved "community" akin to the ruins of Pompeii-in this case, not a scene of human domesticity but a spectacular dinosaur graveyard. This program explores the site and evokes one of the most exciting questions in paleontology: how and why did dinosaurs become gigantic? Viewers are shown specimens from...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: Renowned paleontologist Jack Horner has spent his career trying to reconstruct a dinosaur. He's found fossils with extraordinarily well-preserved blood vessels and soft tissue, but never intact DNA. Trying a new approach, Horner has now been taking living descendants of the dinosaur - chickens - and genetically engineering them to reactivate ancestral traits. In this TEDTalk, Horner discusses...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
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Summary: Did the ancestors of the human race go through a crucial semi-aquatic phase? This balanced program examines the latest evidence that water played a major role in human evolution and assesses how it stands up to the traditional Savanna Theory proposed by Darwin. Preeminent critics and adherents of the Aquatic Ape Theory discuss such key points as humans' unique diving reflex and voluntary breath...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: In this program, James Lovelock explains the development and evolution of his Gaia hypothesis, which considers the Earth as an intimately linked system of physical, chemical, and biological processes, interacting in a self-regulating way to maintain the conditions necessary for life. He discusses counterarguments proposed by scientists including Richard Dawkins. The Daisyworld climatic...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: Is the key theory about how we evolved from apes based on mistaken evidence? Since 1974, the 3.2-million-year-old fossil dubbed "Lucy" has been considered humankind's prime ancestor. Now, a fossil recently unearthed in Kenya by distinguished paleontologist Dr. Meave Leakey is rewriting the theories. This program examines the implications of Flat-Faced Man, a bipedal hominid just as old as Lucy...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: This program provides arguments in favor of continental drift and the one-time existence of a supercontinent, shows how isolation can give rise to different species and how species develop in response to their environments, and explains clines and suggests the reason for their existence. After viewing the program, students should understand the significance of the continental drift theory, the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: Earth, water, wind, and fire according to tradition, these four pieces make up the complex puzzle of our world. In the spirit of that tradition, is there a fifth component, one so close and disturbingly powerful that we choose to overlook it? This program reverses the concept that nature shapes human destiny and instead focuses on the impact our species has had, and will continue to have, on...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
View online at AVOD
Summary: Often thought of as nature at its most elusive and chaotic, the wind is actually a function of highly regimented patterns-forces within the Earth's atmosphere that have shaped the destiny of continents and lie at the heart of some of the greatest turning points in human history. This program travels to stunning locations in the Sahara desert, on the coast of West Africa, and among the currents...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: Nearly everything we know of dinosaurs comes from bones and teeth-usually the only body parts durable enough to fossilize. This program highlights the scientific rewards resulting from a 1999 discovery of a virtually intact dinosaur mummy. Viewers will learn about the conditions that preserved the 67-million-year-old hadrosaur specimen as well as exciting details of what the creature looked...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
View online at AVOD
Summary: Much of our understanding of climate change and the precarious state of the Earth's polar ice is due to the work of French glaciologist Claude Lorius. This program documents several of his missions to Antarctica and his primary innovation: heavy-hydrogen analysis of drilled ice core samples. Detailed interviews with Lorius and with several of his colleagues are interwoven with astonishing,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: This Science Screen Report studies the Wollemi Pine, its 100-million-year history, and the methods used to protect and sustain it. Describing the tree's physical characteristics, its unusual way of propagating, and the medically valuable fungi that grow on its leaves and stems, the program explains how this living organism closely resembles fossils of long-extinct species, and how seed...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: The Book of Genesis states that the earth, its heavens, water, and land were formed in six days. But how old is the earth? Up until the 19th century, experts had ascertained the time of the creation at 4004 B.C., less than 6000 years earlier. However, by dating rocks, noting the lack of fossils and bacteria in some areas of the globe, and studying meteorites, geologists have determined that the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: The demise of the dinosaurs remains a mystery. One theory is that a violent series of volcanic eruptions led to periodic mass extinctions of animal life throughout the Cretaceous period. Viewers follow scientists as they trace the evidence deep into the earth's core of molten metal and learn why these deadly eruptions were so vital to the progress of evolution.
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: Beginning with a mind-boggling stunt that only science or spirituality can justify-a veritable walk through fire-this program examines humankind's long, complicated relationship with the ravenous power of combustion. Fire was, for millennia, humanity's principal source of heat and energy, and viewers learn the implications of that fact in scenes of Britain's industrial revolution as well as...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
View online at AVOD
Summary: Sea-level change has occurred throughout Earth's history. What can the past tell scientists today about the rise and fall of the planet's oceans? This program takes viewers on a virtual field trip to the Book Cliffs, in Utah-the place where sequence stratigraphy was developed and tested-to study and interpret the sedimentary record there. Some of the field evidence for sea-level change is...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: This episode of the award-winning PBS series NOVA explores an intriguing question: how did warm-blooded dinosaurs survive and even thrive in frigid polar regions? A field expedition seeks the answer at Alaska’s North Slope, tunneling into the permafrost to excavate dinosaur fossils. This documentary shows reconstructions and animations of the fossils and discusses the many questions raised by...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
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Summary: All other life forms except humans exist to propagate themselves and pass on their genes; humans alone work to other ends. In this lecture, Richard Dawkins distinguishes between the result of eons of natural selection which has resulted in, say, a bird's tail, whose purpose is to enable the bird to fly-purpose with a survival value-and deliberate design, like an airplane's tail. Dawkins shows...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
View online at AVOD
Summary: When paleontologist Per Ahlberg discovered a strange fossil overlooked for decades at a museum in Latvia, he knew he was onto something. In this astounding program, Ahlberg and Jenny Clack, of the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology; Ted Daeschler, of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences; and Keith Thomson, of the Oxford University Museum, reexamine the evolution of the first...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: Throughout history, human settlements and societies have been strangely drawn to fault lines, those mysterious places where the Earth's crust reveals its tenuous nature, and to other areas that connect the surface of the planet with its deep interior. This program explores the significance of caves and other geological formations in the development of civilization. Viewers enter a spectacular...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
View online at AVOD
Summary: Filmed in magnificent locations in Iceland, India, and the Middle East, this program looks at how control over water has been a central factor in human existence. Viewers take a precarious flight in a motorized paraglider to experience the water cycle up close; discover how villagers in the Himalayan foothills have built a living bridge to cope with the monsoon; and visit Egypt to study the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
View online at AVOD
Summary: This program explores how the colossal, mind-boggling forces of the early universe made it possible for habitable worlds to emerge. The clues begin with a race among scientists to capture lingering echoes of the big bang's ferocious energy in a microwave “whisper” from deep space. The race pits underdog astronomer Tony Readhead and his improvised detector in the high Andes against NASA...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2004
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Summary: Since Darwin's day, explanations for the causation of evolution have come and gone, Lamarckism, mutationism, and the existence of a built-in mechanism driving to perfection all dismissed for lack of evidence and the proofs of molecular biology. Ernst Mayr examines and evaluates the modifications and adaptations to Darwin's theory of natural selection, to determine whether the resulting...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
View online at AVOD
Summary: Sir Andrew Huxley-grandson of Darwin's great defender, Thomas Huxley-describes Darwin's motivations, discoveries, and search for a logical theory to explain his observations of both geological and biological evidence in South America, focusing on Darwin's importance as the first to present strong, scientific evidence for descent with modification and to posit a plausible mechanism for its...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008