Animals in the womb

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More images here.

In the Womb: Animals is a two-hour documentary which will be broadcast on the National Geographic Channel on December 10th, and on UK’s Channel 4 over the Christmas holidays on Thursday, 21st December.

Produced by Pioneer Productions, it features, for the first time, the use of state-of-the-art four-dimensional ultrasound technology to observe the embryonic and foetal development of mammals. The intra-uterine footage in the film has been generated using a combination of ultrasound and computer-generated imagery.

The film focuses on dogs, dolphins, and elephants, charting the development of the latter from the single-cell stage through to its birth. The elephant has a gestation period of 22 months, the longest in the animal kingdom.

There’s an extended sneak preview of the film at the National Geographic Channel website, and here’s a clip from an earlier film by the same production company, about a more familiar mammalian species:

4 thoughts on “Animals in the womb

  1. I work as a Docent and this gives me more information to distribute. Thank you very much for the wonderful pictures. Gives me a totally new awareness of conception to birth.

  2. It should be worth watching, but be careful to distinguish actual within-womb photography from CGI. The earlier film, on humans, was criticised (in the UK at least) for not making it clear when the ‘baby’ was a model or a CGI creation. The models were so ‘realistic’ (whatever that means in this context!) that a lot of viewers assumed everything was real photography.

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