HHMI BioInteractive Short Films

Growing up near Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, Tonga Torcida has dreamt of becoming a tour guide at the park. But when he meets and gets to work with ant biologist E.O. Wilson in the park, his views of the world around him—and of his future—drastically change. Torcida decides to pursue a career in science and work to ensure that the park is enjoyed by future generations. Produced by Academy Award winning filmmaker Jessica Yu, the film weaves themes in conservation biology and environmental science, the value of scientific mentorship, and the social and economic realities of wilderness restoration.

In his book On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin boldly predicted that buried deep in the earth would be creatures with features that were intermediate between those of ancestral and modern groups. At the time no such fossils had been found, and Darwin’s critics immediately seized on that fact to refute the theory of evolution. But since Darwin’s time, many transitional fossils have been discovered, and they provide crucial insights into the origin of key structures and the creatures that possess them. Starring University of Chicago paleontologist and award-winning author Neil Shubin, the film Great Transitions: The Origin of Tetrapods, provides a first-hand account of the painstaking search for Tiktaalik, a fossil fish with a mix of features common to fish and four-legged animals. What made the discovery of Tiktaalik so compelling is that it, along with the series of fossils of species that existed before and after, illuminates key evolutionary steps in the transition of life from water to land.

This animated short video tells the story of Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection at the same time as Charles Darwin. Co-directed by Flora Lichtman and Sharon Shattuck of Sweet Fern Production, the video tracks A. R. Wallace’s life from growing up in England to his voyages with Henry Walter Bates and later adventures in the Malay Archipelago.

In the early 1800s, most people, scientists included, accepted as fact that every species was specially created by God in a form that never changed. The epic voyages and revolutionary insights of two brave young British naturalists, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, overturned this long-held idea. Prodigious collectors of animals and plants, each man developed a keen appreciation for the variation within species, the relatedness of species, and the patterns of geographic distribution—evidence that was hard to reconcile with special creation. This hard-earned knowledge led each to ask why and how creatures came to live in a given place.

Over the past four decades, evolutionary biologists Rosemary and Peter Grant have documented the evolution of the famous Galápagos finches by tracking changes in body traits directly tied to survival, such as beak length, and identified behavioral characteristics that prevent different species from breeding with one another. Their pioneering studies have revealed clues as to how 13 distinct finch species arose from a single ancestral population that migrated from the mainland 2 million to 3 million years ago.

Working in the islands of the Caribbean, biologist Jonathan Losos has discovered the traits that enable dozens of anole species to adapt to different vertical niches in the forest. While differences in limb length, body shape, and toepad size allow different species to flourish on the ground, on thin branches, or high in the canopy, changes in other characters, such as their colorful dewlaps, have played a key role in reproductive isolation and the formation of new species.

James Watson and Francis Crick collected and interpreted key evidence to determine that DNA molecules take the shape of a twisted ladder—a double helix. The film presents the challenges, false starts, and eventual success of their bold chase, culminating in the classic 1953 publication in Nature on the structure of DNA. Watson relates what those early days in the Cavendish Laboratory were like, including his friendship with Crick and their shared ambition and passion. Rarely seen archival footage is combined with interviews with some of today’s leading scientists to bring this landmark discovery and all of its implications to life.

Human babies drink milk; it's the food especially provided for them by their mothers. Various cultures have also added the milk of other mammals to their diet and adults think nothing of downing a glass of cows' milk. But worldwide, only a third of adults can actually digest lactose, the sugar in milk. In this short film we follow human geneticist Spencer Wells, Director of the Genographic Project of the National Geographic Society, as he tracks down the genetic changes associated with the ability to digest lactose as adults, tracing the origin of the trait to less than 10,000 thousand years ago, a time when some human populations started domesticating animals, including goats, sheep, and cows. Combining genetics, chemistry, and anthropology, this story provides a compelling example of the co-evolution of human genes and human culture.

After the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago, populations of marine stickleback fish became stranded in freshwater lakes dotted throughout the northern Hemisphere in places of natural beauty like Alaska and British Columbia. These remarkable little fish have adapted and thrive, living permanently in a freshwater environment drastically different than the ocean. Stickleback bodies have undergone a dramatic transformation, some populations completely losing long projecting body spines that defend them from large predators. Various scientists, including David Kingsley and Michael Bell, have studied living populations of threespine sticklebacks, identified key genes and genetic switches in the evolution of body transformation, and even documented the evolutionary change over thousands of years by studying a remarkable fossil record from the site of an ancient lake ten million years ago. Watch this film to learn about a species where we can study evolution in action, identify key genes, and peer deep into the evolutionary past.

The disappearance of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period posed one of the greatest, long-standing scientific mysteries. This three-act film tells the story of the extraordinary detective work that solved it. Shot on location in Italy, Spain, Texas, Colorado, and North Dakota, the film traces the uncovering of key clues that led to the stunning discovery that an asteroid struck the Earth 66 million years ago, triggering a mass extinction of animals, plants, and even microorganisms. Each act illustrates the nature and power of the scientific method. Representing a rare instance in which many different disciplines—geology, physics, biology, chemistry, paleontology—contributed to a revolutionary theory, the film is intended for students in all science classes.