One cameraman spent hundreds of hours waiting for the fleeting moment when a Darwin's frog, which incubates its young in its mouth, finally spat them out.

The programmes also pioneered a style of presentation whereby David Attenborough would begin describing a certain species' behaviour in one location, before cutting to another to complete his illustration.

The best remembered sequence occurs in the twelfth episode, when Attenborough encounters a group of mountain gorillas in Dian Fossey's sanctuary in Rwanda.

Discarding his scripted speech, he turned to camera and delivered a whispered ad lib: There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than with any other animal I know.

He subsequently discovered, to his chagrin, that only a few seconds had been recorded: the cameraman was running low on film and wanted to save it for the planned description of the opposable thumb.

[3] In 1999 viewers of Channel 4 voting for the 100 Greatest TV Moments placed the gorilla sequence at number 12—ranking it ahead of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation and the wedding of Charles and Diana.

The series attracted a weighted average of 15 million viewers in the UK, an exceptionally high figure for a BBC documentary back in the late 1970s.

[4][5][6] However, Life on Earth did not generate the same revenue for the BBC as later Attenborough series because the corporation signed away the American and European rights to their co-production partners, Warner Bros. and Reiner Moritz.

A shortened series, using the footage and commentary from the original, was aired in 1997, edited down to three episodes: early life forms, plants, insects, and amphibians in the first; fish, birds and reptiles in the second; and mammals in the third.

The pieces were crafted scene-by-scene to synchronise with and complement the imagery on screen: in one sequence examining the flight of birds, the instrumentation mirrors each new creature's appearance.