What Darwin Never Knew

The Earth is abundant with a wide variety of animals, including 28,000 fish species, 9,000 types of bird and over 350,000 kinds of beetle. What Darwin Never Knew seeks to shed light on the 1.4 million discovered species that live on the planet, as well as the millions still undiscovered, and how they came about.

The source of Earth’s life forms had been an age-old riddle until Charles Darwin proposed the groundbreaking idea of natural selection in his book On the Origin of Species. However, his revolutionary theory gave rise to more questions than it answered. What causes evolution and the transformation of one species into another? To what extent do animals rely on a shared genetic toolkit? And how did humans themselves evolve?

What Darwin Never Knew offers answers to these puzzling questions. New scientific breakthroughs have connected the mysteries of evolution to embryonic development. The film travels from the Galápagos Islands to the Arctic and into modern research laboratories, tracking the dramatic increase in animal species that occurred half a billion years ago.