David Attenborough's Natural Curiosities

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

Nature can baffle us so much we don't believe what we see. David discovers the curiosities of the platypus and the tadpole have led to accusations of forgery and have ultimately helped us rethink evolution.

Aging and eternal youth seem to fascinate us. David encounters two examples where curious bodies and extreme lifestyles may unlock the secrets of the aging process and longevity.

Both the narwhal and the snail have developed a twist: the narwhal with its ferocious prong and the snail with its chic mobile home. David Attenborough questions why spirals are so widespread in nature. He gleans some answers by examining the narwhal's tusk and the spiral shells found on snails and ammonites, as he continues to discover nature's evolutionary anomalies.

Animals that are beautifully patterned or brilliantly colored have attracted the attention of collectors for centuries. David Attenborough examines a zebra's stripes and the wings of a butterfly, animal patterns that have bedazzled and baffled science for a long time, and uses modern tools to unlock their secrets.