{"id":572145,"date":"2026-05-08T01:52:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T01:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/572145\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T01:52:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T01:52:09","slug":"attenborough-the-risk-taker-who-changed-how-we-see-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/572145\/","title":{"rendered":"Attenborough: The risk-taker who changed how we see Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"sm-text__text\">By the 1990s, four decades into his work, Sir David\u2019s influence had become a cornerstone of the scientific community.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I go around to zoology departments and universities round the world and professors come up and say &#8216;The reason I&#8217;ve got this professorship was that I saw Life on Earth'&#8221;, he recalled.<\/p>\n<p>More than 50 species \u2013 ranging from frogs and beetles to a carnivorous plant and a tropical butterfly \u2013 now bear his name in their official scientific classification. <\/p>\n<p>These honours include a fossilised &#8216;odd bird&#8217; from China and, most recently, a fungus named after him in 2025.<\/p>\n<p>The first species to bear his name was identified in 1993: a marine reptile fossil discovered along England\u2019s Jurassic Coast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By the 1990s, four decades into his work, Sir David\u2019s influence had become a cornerstone of the scientific&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":572146,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48,3496,3497,3495],"class_list":["post-572145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-visual-journalism","tag-visualjournalism","tag-vj"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=572145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572145\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/572146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=572145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=572145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=572145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}