Martin Jenkins built his career studying the natural world firsthand, from investigating the wildlife trade across three continents to writing more than fifty books on animals and conservation for young readers. His YouTube series, The Story of Life on Earth, extends that same instinct for real science into deep time, tracing the fossil record from Earth’s earliest organisms all the way through to the age of dinosaurs and the T-Rex.
Episode 1, Before Life, is live now on YouTube, with a companion piece on Medium, covering the conditions on early Earth before life existed at all. It’s the foundation for everything that follows: the emergence of the first microbes, the slow build toward complex life, and eventually the vast diversity of the fossil record, dinosaurs included.
Future episodes will move further along that timeline, into the age of dinosaurs and species like the T-Rex, tracing how the fossil record captures hundreds of millions of years of life on Earth.
That same sweep of deep time runs through Martin’s books as well. His 2019 title Life: The First Four Billion Years, illustrated by Grahame Baker-Smith, traces Earth’s story from the Big Bang through the age of dinosaurs and the fossil record to the first mammals, the same territory the YouTube series is now exploring episode by episode.
Watch Episode 1 on YouTube, read the companion piece on Medium, and check back as the series continues.
Every episode so far
Each episode of The Story of Life on Earth has its own dedicated page with more detail, sources, and the full video.