Bbc In The Flesh

Tim Cahill's fierce enthusiasm for exploration has taken him around the globe and knows no bounds. He is at home briefing us on gorilla etiquette or the loathsome fate awaiting those who disturb ruins in the jungles of the Amazon.

Historian Bettany Hughes retraces the lives of three great thinkers whose ideas shaped the modern world - Karl Marx, Frederick Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud.

In October 1972, a student rugby team boarded a small plane in Montevideo to fly across the Andes for a long weekend of playing rugby and partying in Chile.

Victorian Sensations transports us to the last years of Queen Victoria's reign to explore a moment of thrilling discovery and change that continues to resonate today.

Painted over five centuries ago, Filippo Lippi's nativity is like no other: the birth of Christ in a dark, wooded wilderness. Its beauty inspired Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli. But it also conceals a deeply personal story. It was painted for Cosimo de' Medici, a wealthy banker who feared that his money was dragging him straight to hell. The artist's life was equally surprising.

Louis Theroux heads to California, the US adoption capital, where the majority of newborn adoptions are carried out privately, creating a multimillion dollar industry. Agencies, facilitators and lawyers can earn thousands of dollars per baby by matching up pregnant women prepared to give up their newborns with adoptive parents willing to pay up to $50,000 for the privilege. Louis spends time with the birth mothers preparing to hand over their own flesh and blood, uncovering the stories of poverty, addiction and abuse that can push these women into making such a heartbreaking decision.

Could a pterodactyl as large as a light aircraft have flown? Did millipedes once grow to six feet long? How did insects become preserved in amber for over 50 million years? All these questions and more are answered through the study of fossils. In his journeys to the most famous fossil sites in the world, David Attenborough discovers a pre-historic world teeming with life and full of enticing clues as to how life evolved. They reveal how dinosaurs hunted, lived in groups and cared for their young. And they offer glimpses of the most bizarre creatures that ever lived, such as tiny horses and an animal that is half bird and half reptile. With the help of expert palaeontologists, fossil enthusiasts from around the world and sophisticated modelling. Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives breathes life into Earth's distant past.