Animals in the womb
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:
wow.
thanks.
Alvaro
27 Nov 06 at 6:20 pm
Breathtakingly wonderful and beautiful. Thanks
Judy
30 Nov 06 at 8:30 pm
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.
Kay
8 Dec 06 at 8:39 pm
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.
David B
16 Dec 06 at 5:03 pm