Too cool, part 22: Your Inner Fish on PBS

Damn, this is what comes from being out of the loop as much as I am. While I never hear about what every chuzzlewit celebrity is up to (which is a major plus,) I also don’t hear about promising new programs in time to give adequate notice. Case in point: Your Inner Fish, airing tonight on PBS.

That name should sound familiar, considering that I reviewed the book of the same name a few years back (and you’ve undoubtedly read every post I’ve ever made.) The author, Neil Shubin, is the host of this show, the first of a three part series – following behind are Your Inner Reptile and Your Inner Monkey. The first airs tonight (April 9th) at 10 PM Eastern Time on PBS. And I have to say, if the preview and Shubin’s writing are any indication, it should be pretty damn good.

UPDATE: I have no idea what they’re doing, but the video clip I tried to embed has gone back and forth in the space of an hour, currently giving me a “no longer available” error. If you get that, just click on the link further down to go directly to their site, which I highly recommend, since the previews are great.

Check out all of the clips on their site – it certainly doesn’t look like they skimped on production values.

Anyone familiar with hominid fossils will instantly recognize the incomplete skeleton they’re laying out in several places in that clip: it’s Lucy of course, Australopithecus afarensis, and yes, that’s really all we have of that particular specimen, which is actually quite a bit for that time period – for many others, we have only a handful of fragments, and a few even have just one bit. It’s easy to question whether one bit can tell us anything, but if it doesn’t match anything else we have, then it tells us that it likely belongs to a whole new species. By the way, Lucy is not the only Au. afarensis specimen we have, though it was for a while – we actually have bones from ten individuals, including a toddler.

Anyway, check out the program! I may be back with a review myself…