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Wild Down Under
''Wild Down Under'' is a BBC nature documentary series exploring the natural history of the Australasian continent, first transmitted in the UK on BBC Two in September 2003. It was broadcast in Australia under the title ''Wild Australasia'' in February 2004. In Canada, the show aired as episodes of The Nature of Things under the ''Wild Australia'' title. Each of the six episodes features a particular environment and, using a combination of aerial photography and traditional wildlife footage, reveals how physical forces and human activity have transformed Australasia from a lush green wilderness into an increasingly dry and harsh continent, troubled by unpredictable weather but still home to a huge array of creatures found nowhere else on Earth.. ''Wild Down Under'' was co-produced by the BBC Natural History Unit, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and Animal Planet. The series was produced for the BBC by Neil Nightingale and executive-produced for ABC by Dione Gilmou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nature Documentary
A nature documentary or wildlife documentary is a genre of documentary film or television documentary, series about animals, plants, or other non-human living creatures. Nature documentaries usually concentrate on video taken in the subject's natural habitat, but often including footage of trained and captive animals, too. Sometimes they are about wildlife or ecosystems in relationship to human beings. Such programmes are most frequently made for television, particularly for public broadcasting channels, but some are also made for the movie theater, cinema. The proliferation of this film genre, genre occurred almost simultaneously alongside the production of similar television series which is distributed across the world. Cinema Robert J. Flaherty's 1922 film ''Nanook of the North'' is typically cited as the first feature-length documentary. Decades later, Walt Disney Productions pioneered the serial theatrical release of nature-documentaries with its production of the True-Life A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lord Howe Island
Lord Howe Island (; formerly Lord Howe's Island) is an irregularly crescent-shaped volcanic remnant in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand, part of the Australian state of New South Wales. It lies directly east of mainland Port Macquarie, northeast of Sydney, and about southwest of Norfolk Island. It is about long and between wide with an area of , though just of that comprise the low-lying developed part of the island. The island is named after Richard Howe, 1st Earl Howe. Along the west coast is a sandy semi-enclosed sheltered coral reef lagoon. Most of the population lives in the north, while the south is dominated by forested hills rising to the highest point on the island, Mount Gower (). The Lord Howe Island Group comprises 28 islands, islets, and rocks. Apart from Lord Howe Island itself, the most notable of these is the volcanic and uninhabited Ball's Pyramid about to the southeast of Howe. To the north lies the Admiralty Group, a cluster of seven ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sugar Glider
The sugar glider (''Petaurus breviceps'') is a small, omnivorous, arboreal, and nocturnal gliding possum. The common name refers to its predilection for sugary foods such as sap and nectar and its ability to glide through the air, much like a flying squirrel. They have very similar habits and appearance to the flying squirrel, despite not being closely related—an example of convergent evolution. The scientific name, ''Petaurus breviceps'', translates from Latin as "short-headed rope-dancer", a reference to their canopy acrobatics. The sugar glider is characterised by its pair of gliding membranes, known as patagia, which extend from its forelegs to its hindlegs. Gliding serves as an efficient means of reaching food and evading predators. The animal is covered in soft, pale grey to light brown fur which is countershaded, being lighter in colour on its underside. The sugar glider, as strictly defined in a recent analysis, is only native to a small portion of southeaste ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Striped Possum
The striped possum or common striped possum (''Dactylopsila trivirgata'') is a member of the marsupial family Petauridae. It is found mainly in New Guinea. The species is black with three white stripes running head to tail, and its head has white stripes that form a 'Y' shape. It is closely related to the sugar glider, and is similar in appearance. Taxonomy The striped possum was first described by John Edward Gray in 1858 from a specimen sent from the Aru Islands (in Indonesia) to the British Museum by Alfred Russel Wallace. Gray gave the species the name ''Dactylopsila trivirgata'' in 1858, the name the species retains today. The illustration that appeared alongside the first description was produced by Joseph Wolf. Range The striped possum is most commonly found in New Guinea as well as several other small islands in the area (including the Solomon Islands). It also lives in Queensland, Australia, in rainforests and eucalypt woodland along the east coast of Cape York ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cassowary
Cassowaries (; Biak: ''man suar'' ; ; Papuan: ''kasu weri'' ) are flightless birds of the genus ''Casuarius'', in the order Casuariiformes. They are classified as ratites, flightless birds without a keel on their sternum bones. Cassowaries are native to the tropical forests of New Guinea (Western New Guinea and Papua New Guinea), the Moluccas (Seram and Aru Islands), and northeastern Australia.. Three cassowary species are extant. The most common, the southern cassowary, is the third-tallest and second-heaviest living bird, smaller only than the ostrich and emu. The other two species are the northern cassowary and the dwarf cassowary; the northern cassowary is the most recently discovered and the most threatened. A fourth, extinct, species is the pygmy cassowary. Cassowaries are very wary of humans, but if provoked, they are capable of inflicting serious, even fatal, injuries. They are known to attack both dogs and people. The cassowary has often been labelled "the wor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Top End
The Top End of Australia's Northern Territory is a geographical region encompassing the northernmost section of the Northern Territory, which aside from the Cape York Peninsula is the northernmost part of the Australian continent. It covers a rather vaguely defined area of about behind the northern coast from the Northern Territory capital of Darwin across to Arnhem Land with the Indian Ocean on the west, the Arafura Sea to the north, and the Gulf of Carpentaria to the east, and with the almost waterless semi-arid interior of Australia to the south, beyond the huge Kakadu National Park. The Top End contains the Territory's regional center and its capital city, Darwin, as well as major towns such as Palmerston and Katherine. The well-known town of Alice Springs is located further south, in the arid southern part of the Northern Territory, sometimes referred to by Australians as the Red Centre. The landscape is relatively flat with river floodplains and grasslands with e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rainforest
Rainforests are forests characterized by a closed and continuous tree Canopy (biology), canopy, moisture-dependent vegetation, the presence of epiphytes and lianas and the absence of wildfire. Rainforests can be generally classified as tropical rainforests or temperate rainforests, but other types have been described. Estimates vary from 40% to 75% of all biotic community, biotic species being Indigenous (ecology), indigenous to the rainforests. There may be many millions of species of plants, insects and microorganisms still undiscovered in tropical rainforests. Tropical rainforests have been called the "jewels of the Earth" and the "medicine chest (idiom), world's largest pharmacy", because over one quarter of natural medicines have been discovered there. Rainforests as well as endemic rainforest species are rapidly disappearing due to #Deforestation, deforestation, the resulting habitat loss and air pollution, pollution of the atmosphere. Definition Rainforests are cha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Platypus
The platypus (''Ornithorhynchus anatinus''), sometimes referred to as the duck-billed platypus, is a semiaquatic, egg-laying mammal endemic to eastern Australia, including Tasmania. The platypus is the sole living representative or monotypic taxon of its family Ornithorhynchidae and genus ''Ornithorhynchus'', though a number of related species appear in the fossil record. Together with the four species of echidna, it is one of the five extant species of monotremes, mammals that lay eggs instead of giving birth to live young. Like other monotremes, the platypus has a sense of electrolocation, which it uses to detect prey in cloudy water. It is one of the few species of venomous mammals, as the male platypus has a spur on the hind foot that delivers an extremely painful venom. The unusual appearance of this egg-laying, duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed mammal at first baffled European naturalists. In 1799, the first scientists to examine a preserved platypus bod ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wombat
Wombats are short-legged, muscular quadrupedal marsupials of the family Vombatidae that are native to Australia. Living species are about in length with small, stubby tails and weigh between . They are adaptable and habitat tolerant, and are found in forested, mountainous, and heathland areas of southern and eastern Australia, including Tasmania, as well as an isolated patch of about in Epping Forest National Park in central Queensland. Etymology The name "wombat" comes from the now nearly extinct Dharug language spoken by the aboriginal Dharug people, who originally inhabited the Sydney area. It was first recorded in January 1798, when John Price and James Wilson, Europeans who had adopted aboriginal ways, visited the area of what is now Bargo, New South Wales. Price wrote: "We saw several sorts of dung of different animals, one of which Wilson called a 'Whom-batt', which is an animal about high, with short legs and a thick body with a large head, round ears, and very ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Australian Alps
The Australian Alps are a mountain range in southeast Australia. The range comprises an Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia, interim Australian bioregion,IBRA Version 6.1 data and is the highest mountain range in Australia. The range straddles the borders of eastern Victoria (Australia), Victoria, southeastern New South Wales, and the Australian Capital Territory. It contains Australia's only peaks exceeding in elevation, and is the only bioregion on the Australian mainland in which deep Snow in Australia, snow falls annually. The range comprises an area of . The Australian Alps are part of the Great Dividing Range, the series of mountain and hill ranges and tablelands that runs about from northern Queensland, through New South Wales, and into the northern part of Victoria ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wallaby
A wallaby () is a small or middle-sized Macropodidae, macropod native to Australia and New Guinea, with introduced populations in New Zealand, Hawaii, the United Kingdom and other countries. They belong to the same Taxonomy (biology), taxonomic family as kangaroos and sometimes the same genus, but kangaroos are specifically categorised into the four largest species of the family. The term "wallaby" is an informal designation generally used for any macropod that is smaller than a kangaroo or a wallaroo that has not been designated otherwise. There are nine species (eight extant and one Extinction, extinct) of the brush wallaby (genus ''Notamacropus''). Their head and body length is and the tail is long. The 19 known species of Rock-wallaby, rock-wallabies (genus ''Petrogale'') live among rocks, usually near water; two species in this genus are endangered. The two living species of hare-wallabies (genus ''Lagorchestes''; two other species in this genus are extinct) are sma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tasmanian Devil
The Tasmanian devil (''Sarcophilus harrisii''; palawa kani: ''purinina'') is a carnivorous marsupial of the family Dasyuridae. It was formerly present across mainland Australia, but became extinct there around 3,500 years ago; it is now confined to the island of Tasmania. The size of a small dog, the Tasmanian devil became the largest carnivorous marsupial in the world following the extinction of the thylacine in 1936. It is related to quolls, and distantly related to the thylacine. It is characterised by its stocky and muscular build, black fur, pungent odour, extremely loud and disturbing screech, keen sense of smell, and ferocity when feeding. The Tasmanian devil's large head and neck allow it to generate among the strongest bites per unit body mass of any extant predatory land mammal. It hunts prey and scavenges on carrion. Although devils are usually solitary, they sometimes eat and defecate together in a communal location. Unlike most other dasyurids, the devil the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
