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Oct 24, 2023 · For billions of years, land on Earth was uninhabitable. But in the seas, predation allowed species to thrive before — and after — two mass extinctions. Morgan Freeman: For billions of years, much of our world was fiercely inhospitable... ...ravaged by the elements and the forces of nature.
- Overview
- Synopsis
- Animals featured
- Errors
- Trivia
Chapter 2: The First Frontier is the second episode of Life On Our Planet. It focuses on the beginnings of complex life in the oceans during the Paleozoic era, through Earth's first two mass extinction events.
The episode opens in the Ordovician Period. Morgan Freeman explains that life had taken hold beneath the waves, the only place for billions of years that could sustain life. During a thunderstorm, a group of Cameroceras are seen moving with the current near the surface of the ocean, drifting closer to the camera with each lightning strike.
The scene cuts to a primordial Earth, inhospitable due to a toxic atmosphere and volcanic activity. Life first started in the oceans, where the first plankton developed photosynthesis to harness the sun's energy to grow. Plankton eventually released oxygen into the atmosphere, transforming the planet and setting the stage for the first animals to evolve. Various marine invertebrates are shown, being similar to the very first animals that appeared on Earth with soft bodies, senses, and being rooted to the seafloor. A rainbow nudibranch is shown off the coast of California devouring a sea anemone from the inside out, representing the arrival of predation.
530 million years ago, the first jellyfish arrived on the scene. They were the first animals to escape the seafloor and swim, but in their larval stages they have to avoid the stinging tentacles of sea anemones to float out into open water. Entirely free of predation, the jellyfish would rule the seas for more than half a billion years.
The episode transitions to 508 million years ago, in what is now British Columbia during the Cambrian period. An Olenoides trilobite is shown as one of the first arthropods to have evolved. Trilobites developed a tough exoskeleton to protect themselves from predators such as the world's first apex predator Anomalocaris. The Olenoides manages to evade the agile "abnormal shrimp" long enough to curl into a ball, which even the raptorial appendages of the hunter cannot penetrate. After the Anomalocaris leaves, the trilobite heads off to the Olenoides mating grounds, where thousands of his kind have gathered to breed.
During the Ordovician period, 468 million years ago, trilobite armor became even more robust to deal with larger predators such as the giant nautiloid Cameroceras. In the tropical reefs, a Cameroceras chases an Ordovician trilobite into a narrow crevice, using its giant tentacles to ensnare the arthropod and crush it with its giant beak. The many scraps of trilobite flesh scattered over the area attracts a school of Arandaspis fish, one of the very first vertebrates. Without jaws, it can only suck up food, but its new internal skeleton makes it both quick and agile.
445 million years ago, the Ordovician climate started to cool after a 60% drop in carbon dioxide. The lack of this important greenhouse gas plunged the Earth into an ice age for 200,000 years and froze oceans across the world. The inhabitants of the shallow seas were all but wiped out, turning the once-lush habitat into a frozen graveyard. 85% of all life on Earth died out in the planet's first ever mass extinction event. Animals like the cephalopods managed to survive by heading for deeper water. In the present, cephalopods still thrive in our ocean's deepest waters where they excel as the deep's near-perfect predators. A bobtail squid is shown hunting a shrimp by concealing itself in the sand and stalking the prey with its extraordinary senses.
Prehistoric animals••••Ordovician trilobite
•••
Brief cameos•
Modern animals•Rainbow nudibranch
•Sea anemone
•Sea nettle
•Life is continuously mentioned throughout the series as a "war" between "dynasties" to "dominate the Earth". This in fact inaccurate, as there is no one dominant species on the planet, and no one animal group is "superior" to another. The episode repeatedly implies that vertebrates such as fish are superior to the invertebrates like the cephalopods, which cannot be enforced reliably as they are both successful animal groups that have developed their own unique way of surviving. Invertebrates have survived for much longer than vertebrates and currently consist of many more species.
•The series repeatedly uses predation as a way of showing how each animal clade is superior to another (Cameroceras hunting trilobites to show cephalopod dominance over arthropods, Dunkleosteus hunting ammonoids to show vertebrate dominance over cephalopods, etc.) Predator/prey relationships and a species' position in its environment's food web are not the same thing as evolutionary or Darwinian fitness, leading to the misinterpretation of predators being "more fit" than prey.
•The nautilus was shown as a survivor of the Ordovician extinction event, while in fact it did not evolve until about 200 million years after the Ordovician period.
•Cameroceras was mentioned to have been 8 meters (26 feet) long. This is an outdated size estimate, and it is now generally accepted that the animal could grow up to around 5 meters (16 feet) long at maximum.
•A few months before the show was released, Dunkleosteus was given a new size estimate of 4.1 meters (13.5 feet) by paleontologist Russell Engelman, which downsized the animal to a more compact build than previous estimates. Due to this, Dunkleosteus is now considered to be much smaller than how it was depicted in the show (9 meters or about 30 feet long).
•Sharks did not first appear more than 400 million years ago. True sharks first originated in the early Jurassic period with possible records extending to the early Permian period around 290 million years ago. Sharks have also not remained unchanged like the show states; although they are often referred to as living fossils, there have been countless different shark designs throughout prehistory and the sheer diversity of extant sharks today can still disprove the idea.
•The volcanoes featured at the beginning of the episode were filmed in the Canary Islands and Iceland. At first, the team worried that heavy VFX would be required due to somewhat reduced volcanic activity during production. Two volcanoes erupted almost simultaneously during filming, so this extra step was not needed.
•The Cameroceras sequence was filmed in Saint Lucia. Trilobites were added in with VFX and the location was chosen because of its prevalence of sponges, an ancient relic. When the team arrived, they found dozens of other species, most notably fish that haven't evolved in the Ordovician period. Thus, every single shot had to have its coral reef fish painted out.
•The undersea environment of the Dunkleosteus sequence is the only environment in Life on Our Planet that was completely CGI.
•The opening sequence with the Cameroceras took inspiration from various horror films to shake up expectations for a natural history series and find a fresh way to engage the audience.
•The sarcastic fringehead scene was shot off the coast of California, where the crew spent days braving strong currents to find the fish. An overfamiliar bass was attracted to a camera operator due to mistaking them for a female fish, thus causing more issues with filming.
•Morgan Freeman pronounces the word cephalopod with a hard "C", while it is more often pronounced with a soft "C".
Oct 20, 2023 · Lorne Balfe
Oct 25, 2023 · Chapter 2: The First Frontier - "For billions of years, much of our world was fiercely inhospitable, ravaged by the elements and the forces of nature. This is the story of what was happening beneath the waves.
- Martin Shore
S01E02 Chapter 2: The First Frontier Summary. For billions of years, land on Earth was uninhabitable. But in the seas, predation allowed species to thrive before - and after - two mass extinctions.
Life on Our Planet Chapter - 2 (The First Frontier) Soundtrack [A Netflix Original Series Score] Thriller Soundtrack Music. 15 videos 751 views Last updated on Oct 20, 2023....
Life on Our Planet – Season 1, Episode 2. For billions of years, land on Earth is uninhabitable; however, in the seas, predation allows species to thrive before and after two mass...
