ARKive: Images of life on Earth , Wildscreen Trust, Bristol, Reviewed by Fred Pearce
THE Tasmanian tiger is the new dodo, because we have it on film. Pacing endlessly up and down its cage back in 1936, the last animal awaits the doom of its species. You can watch it forever in the new virtual Noah鈥檚 Ark, now online at .
ARKive is a stirring enterprise: it aims to store and make endlessly available stills, footage and sounds of hundreds, eventually thousands, of rare, endangered, totemic and just plain cuddly species of animals, plants and insects.
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At one level this just looks like edited highlights of footage from patron David Attenborough鈥檚 life鈥檚 work, with added conservation and teaching notes. But the archive鈥檚 randomness reflects the natural world better than the thematic organisation of a TV programme. You skip from that lost Tasmanian tiger to the last film of a Spix macaw in the wild, from a dormouse giving birth to brown hares boxing in an English meadow.
What comes as a shock is the 鈥渕ost-wanted list鈥� 鈥� an online appeal for images and sounds of rare species to join the Ark. I was astonished to find that there really is an unphotographed world out there, slipping away.
ARKive has been set up by the Wildscreen Trust and assembled in Bristol, centre of the BBC鈥檚 natural history film factory, which provides many of the images. And it carries the huge virtue of trying to educate and enthuse rather than sell. It is not aimed at researchers, but rather at the 5 to 11-year-olds who get their own section, and their educators, who get another. There is no biological data that Google could not serve up as quickly. And for the moment its coverage remains patchy 鈥� only two antelopes? But all that is counterbalanced by the powerful images and sounds.