How Plants Evolved, How they breathe Life into The Planet!, How they Create Food for Animals, & Shaped the Animals

From the incredibly absorbing new 3-part series in Feb2012 (Full Series as a playlist here :
http://bit.ly/BBC-How2GrowAPlanet_FullSeries , see below for some interesting clips) about the evolution of plants- and how they literally shaped the animals, including dinosaurs &humans!..

with the first ever footage of a PLANT BREATHING!

Brilliantly narrated 3-part series(though a lil misleading 'How-to..' title),..by geologist Prof Iain Stewart, reveals how the greatest changes to the Earth have been driven, above all, by plants.

 First episode Life From Light showed, how the earliest forms of life, the green-bacteria created oxygen from light, some 2.5billion yrs ago, and how plants inherited the mechanism of this photosynthesis. 

[The clips below take you to the relevant section within this full episode1, 'Life From Light']
This section show Why leaves came into being, and saved plants from suffocation (from lack of CO2),
and live footage of PLANT BREATHING
(e-microscope,  speeded up 140x) - http://bit.ly/PlantBreathing

This episode showed Why the earth has become green, instead of purple!.. -because of the green bacteria in the oceans that created oxygen from light, some 2.5billion yrs ago

-photosynthesis!..

To see microscopic view of How plants produce Oxygen - by inheriting the Photosynthesis mechanism from the green bacteria: http://bit.ly/o2fromPlants

"Nature's most astonishing achievement" -
How Plants use light &CO2 to make sugars- the source of food for all animals:
http://bit.ly/PlantsSugarFromCo2

.....

"He sees how plants harnessed light from the sun and creating our life-giving atmosphere.  He uncovers the epic battle between the dinosaurs and the tallest trees on the planet. And, using remarkable imagery, he shows plants breathing - and for the first time talking to each other"

How Plants Breathe : Animation


Plant "Breathing" Mechanism Discovered

• Roots appeared 400m yrs ago.. around the time, when first animals started living on land- Horse-shoe crab, one of the first ever to emerge on land.. 

• Leafless plants were surviving then.. but as the plants used up most CO2, its levels plummeted by 90%.. and plants evolved with a strategy to extract as much CO2 as possible, by increasing the surface area 100 times- BY GROWING LEAVES!.., their breathing apparatus!- microscopic holes on leaves called stomata- that is present on every leaf on earth! First, the Ferns evolved leaves.. A small Fern may breath in upto 5litres of CO2 a day!.

•  300m yrs ago, forests emerged.. with huge plants.. and O2 levels in the atmosphere increased manifold..  in turn increasing the size of animals! (even insects like millipedes of 2m long, Dragonflies with 1m wingspan etc..

• 230m years ago, emerged bigger and bigger plant eaters, The Dinosaurs!.. with upto the 12m high Sauropods.. massive vegetarians eating upto 1500kg of plants n leaves.., 

• So 150m yrs ago, plants evolved defense mechanism of thorny leaves, and trunk!- the Cycads.. which made up a quarter of all plants on earth..were born, and 

• 70m years ago, in their survival battle with animals, huge conifer trees, like Giant Sequoias grew so tall, upto 90metres tall.. with leaves out of reach of the largest dinosaurs..  Dinosaurs were no longer the biggest organisms on earth! HOW INTRIGUING!! ( The meteor impact at Yucatan, Mexico that wiped out the Dinosaurs is estimated to be ~65m yrs ago. The Last Day of the Dynosaurs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW9IyDcR3iQ )

+prgm homepage  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01bywvr