YouTube Series
New videos on wildlife, conservation, and the story of life on Earth
Martin’s YouTube channel brings the same curiosity behind his books to video — real science and real animals, starting with his series The Story of Life on Earth. The feed below pulls directly from his channel, so it updates automatically every time a new video goes up.
Live feed from Martin’s channel — the newest video always appears first.
What the Series Covers
The Story of Life on Earth follows the same throughline as Martin’s book Life: The First Four Billion Years, but built for video: each episode takes one chapter of that four-billion-year story, the earliest chemistry that could be called alive, the first eyes, the rise and fall of ocean predators, and works through it in enough depth to actually explain the science rather than just gesture at it. It’s aimed at the same curious, slightly older readers who pick up his books, kids who want the real explanation rather than a simplified version.
New episodes are added on a rolling basis, and each one gets its own dedicated page on this site with additional detail and sources beyond what fits in the video itself, listed below.
The series is filmed and edited independently of Martin’s book publishers, which gives it room to move faster than a book’s production schedule and to cover ground, like the most recent fossil discoveries, that wouldn’t make it into print in time to stay current.
Every episode, with its own page
Each episode also has a dedicated page with more detail, sources, and the video itself.
- Episode 1, Before Life
- Episode 2, The First Spark
- Episode 3, The 2.5 Billion Year Secret
- Episode 4, Before We Had Eyes
- Episode 5, How the Ocean’s Top Predators Came to Be
Closed captions are available on every episode, and each video description links back to the matching page on this site for anyone who wants the sources behind a given claim.