New Zealand is a fairytale archipelago with a turbulent geological past. A land with astonishing creatures: flightless birds, night dwellers, living fossils. Evolution has run wild on this isolated land, producing some of the world's most unusual animals.

Australia is a floating laboratory whose ancient geological past and changing climate have triggered mutations in the animals here, culminating in over 200 species of bizarre pouched marsupials, which are all equipped with astounding survival features.

On Brazil's ancient Cerrado grassland a community of eccentric creatures are all inter-dependent, and all life revolves around the landscape of mysterious mud-caked monoliths.

On the shores of Africa's Rift Valley Lakes a troop of chimpanzees provides an astonishing evolutionary counterpoint to the amazing story of small fish living beneath the surface, in a species pressure cooker, unlike anywhere else on the planet.

The land of lemurs, an ancient primate family that evolved from only one small group which arrived on the island more than 60 million years ago. For them Madagascar became the land of evolutionary opportunity and today there are almost 100 living species

Isolated from the Asian mainland, Japan's animals have been forced to endure the most violently active islands on earth in a climate of extremes. Animals cast away on these outcrops must find innovative ways to overcome periods of starvation.