Original subtitles

NARRATOR: A rain forest like no other, icon of Brazil,

but this is not the Amazon.

80 times smaller, yet just as rich,

this is Mata Atlantica, a forest on a remarkable journey.

Over millions of years, enduring cataclysmic change,

always creating more life.

How has this forest become one of Earth's

great biodiversity hotspots?

And why has it been forgotten?

Hi, there.

I'm David Schwimmer, King of Rhetorical Questions.

Join me in facing some of the most dangerous animals

and life threatening locations from the safety

of this armchair in this episode of "Mysterious

Planet, the Forgotten Forest."

[eerie music]

NARRATOR: Brazil's cultural epicenter, home to over 13

million people, Rio de Janeiro.

A bustling metropolis of music and color and dancing,

but right on its back doorstep is a forgotten world that beats

to a very different rhythm.

Mata Atlantica, Brazil's Atlantic rainforest,

a primordial world home to strange and unique life.

These calls are not birdsong.

They belong to something more curious hidden

somewhere up in the trees.

Wait for it.

A golden lion tamarin, a tiny monkey with a lion's mane

found nowhere else on Earth.

They're are no bigger than squirrels

and scamper about like them, but take a closer look

and they are primate through and through.

They are very social and live in groups of around 10,

like a tiny primate sitcom.

Typically, with a breeding female,

her mate, and their offspring.

Family is everything to the tiny tamarins.

Their survival depends on sticking together

for protection and to defend their all important territory,

which is where they find food.

Coming at you.

The menu here is huge.

Today, it's insects, thousands of different types

to choose from.

Insect takeout.

Yeah, got you, baby.

And tamarins are experts at extracting

them with long clawed fingers.

Where are you?

Where's-- here's-- oh, yeah.

Hello, lunch.

As long as they stick together, forest life is good.

They have all the resources they need here.

Their home is one of Earth's great biodiversity hotspots.

Over 20,000 species of plants, and 2,000 animal species,

around half found nowhere else on Earth,

a jungle paradise rivaled only by the Amazon.

But Mata Atlantica is very different from its world

famous neighbor.

The Amazon rain forest is hard to miss covering

over 3 million square miles.

Southeast, forever in its shadow,

lies Mata Atlantica, a thin stretch of green hugging

Brazil's Atlantic coast.

You'd be forgiven for not even knowing it exists,

but it's unique.

From the ocean to the high mountains of the interior,

containing some of South America's most

spectacular wonders, like the Iguazu falls,

and Rio, the great city at its heart.

But it's 80 times smaller than the Amazon

and has an equally rich diversity of life.

How can this be?

That's rhetorical, I'm going to tell you.

One of the most diverse groups of animals in Mata Atlantica

hides in every nook and cranny.

Here's a cranny.

Frogs.

550 species, 80% found nowhere else,

each perfectly adapted to its own miniature world,

and all of them are hunters, but some have

bigger appetites than others.

A horned frog, giant of its kind,

with a mouth nearly 6 inches wide,

it's nicknamed the Pacman frog.

Like its smaller cousins, it's an ambush hunter.

But little bugs don't quite cut it for the Pacman.

It requires something more substantial.

It'd be ironic if he ate French chefs.

Lightning speed and a bite as strong as a dog's,

there's no escape.

Snakes, birds, even small mammals are gobbled up.

You can't even reason with him, but there's

more to the Pacman than its gluttonous appetite

and good looks.

It has a tale to tell, a clue to the mysterious origins

of the forest itself.

Hey, where you--

In Brazil's Atlantic forest, the colossal Pacman frog

has a big appetite and a big story to tell.

Scientists recently discovered that this frog's

ancestors lived over 5,000 miles away on the far side of Africa.

150 million years ago, the Earth looks very different.

South America is joined to Africa

in a great southern continent called Gondwana.

But all that is about to change.

Titanic forces deep within the Earth are stirring.

Gondwana is splitting up, a brutal, brutal divorce.

I wonder who gets the islands?

South America heads West.

Later.

Bye.

As the newborn continent moves on,

along its ruptured coastline, a forest

is forming, the beginnings of Mata Atlantica.

And in the new forest is a stowaway from Gondwana,

the ancestor of the Pacman.

At first, they live alongside dinosaurs, or underneath them,

but as South America drifts further,

the time of the dinosaurs is coming to an end.

I feel a meteor coming on.

Cue, meteor.

Yeah, these leaves will protect me.

I don't hear anything, but doesn't look good.

Yup, there-- Don't worry, guys.

This is CGI.

As the forests recovered following the extinction

of the dinosaurs, the way was opened for species that

had been hiding in their shadow, like an understudy

in the great play of life.

10 million years before the Amazon existed,

in Mata Atlantica strange life was taking to the trees.

Some more quickly than others.

A maned sloth, another species unique to this forest.

Sloths belong to one of the strangest groups

of animals on Earth, called xenarthra,

which means alien joints.

It's thought their weird anatomy was originally designed

for digging and that the sloths ancestors

survived the dinosaur extinction by hiding underground.

Strong claws have become hooks for climbing

so the sloth can get to what it loves most, leaves.

But their diet is so low in calories

they have to save all the energy they can,

so they're not only one of the weirdest creatures on Earth,

they're also one of the slowest.

They spend five hours a day feeding,

the rest of the time they just sleep, like comedians

but without the self-loathing.

Sloths weren't the only xenarthrans to take

to the trees of Mata Atlantica.

Here's another, a tamandua, tree dwelling anteater.

It's following its nose to something irresistible.

No, not me.

Termites.

Nutritious, but tiny and hard to reach.

No problem for the tamandua.

Take that, wood eaters.

Like sloths, its claws are grappling hooks,

and it has a 15 inch sticky tongue, which can

Hoover up 9,000 termites a day.

And it has another unique innovation,

a gripping prehensile tail, like an extra hand, need.

Great for hard to reach meals and tickle fights,

and a good insurance plan when there's nothing between you

and the forest floor.

Show off.

Brazil's Atlantic forest is on an evolutionary journey.

Aren't we all?

The dinosaurs are long gone and new life

is taking to the trees.

One group of animals are the dinosaurs direct descendants.

Birds are the most diverse of all animals in Mata Atlantica.

1,000 different species in all shapes, sizes, and colors.

Some don't seem to have left their dinosaur

roots all that far behind.

A channel-billed toucan can evolved from the one can.

With an appetite for flesh, but it's not hunting for itself.

Frogs and small birds are important

for the growth of baby toucans.

But the bulk of their diet is fruit.

As the male and female take turns

ferrying food to their chicks, they help the forest.

They're one of the top seed dispersers in Mata Atlantica

and play a key part in creating a diversity of trees

matched nowhere else on Earth.

Primates also spread seeds through the forest.

In the wet season, Mata Atlantica's trees

are heavy with ripe fruit, a bounty

golden lion tamarins can't resist.

At this time of year, fruit makes up

the bulk of their diet, that and ice

cream, a vital energy boost.

And they need it.

There are new mouths to feed in the family, twins.

Tamarins almost always have twins

and Mom has her hands full, but that's

where the family come in.

Her little ones need to nurse for nearly two hours every day,

but when she's not suckling, dad and the rest of the family

do the child care.

So mom gets a chance to feast on fruit too.

The timing of the twins arrival is no coincidence.

To produce enough milk for her babies,

she needs all the nutrition she can get.

So tamarin moms have their twins at the peak of forest fruiting.

Their lives are intimately tuned to the rhythm

of this ancient forest.

But tamarins are relatively new arrivals here.

Their ancestors also came from Africa,

but didn't arrive here until about 40

million years ago, when South America

was already separated from Africa

by thousands of miles of ocean.

How did they get here?

Incredible as it seems, scientists now believe they

crossed the Atlantic Ocean.

We can only imagine how it happened.

My guess is tiny surfboards or monkey balloons.

Here goes.

40 million years ago, a massive storm

looms over the African coast.

Trees are the only shelter.

The storm passes and the forest is left standing,

but something isn't right.

Ripped from the land, a floating patch of jungle

held together by Earth, roots, and vines

set adrift in the middle of the Atlantic.

And on board, a tiny ancestral primate that looks

a lot like a tamarin.

A floating forest would have insects

and be the worst cruise ever, enough for a whole family

of small primates.

Pushed on by favorable winds, the crossing might

take as little as 15 days.

A one in a million event transporting

a band of tiny monkeys to a distant shore.

And to a quite remarkable future, because these are not

only the ancestors of the tamarins,

but of all the new world monkeys,

which was also the name of my high school band.

After a remarkable journey across the Atlantic Ocean,

the ancestor of all new world monkeys has arrived.

At the same time, great change is coming to South America.

In the West, the Andes are rising.

The longest mountain range on Earth,

and they start to change the weather, diverting

moist Atlantic winds South to bring tropical rain

right across South America.

The Amazon is growing and spreading, creating

a giant rain forest joining up with the Mata Atlantica,

a forest just waiting for monkeys.

From the remarkable voyage of just a handful of tiny monkeys,

the African ancestors spread out to fill this great forest,

evolving over time into more than 140 different species

of new world monkey.

But about 10 million years ago that spread is halted.

The climate starts to cool and dry.

South American forests begin to shrink.

The Amazon and Mata Atlantica become

cut off from one another.

In between, a great strip of dry savannah

called the Cerrado grows up, forming an impenetrable barrier

for rain forest animals.

Insert joke here.

And in the two forests either side life

starts to go its separate ways.

The Amazon may be huge, but it's flat and uniform.

Mata Atlantic is different.

A clue is in the landscape that defines one of the most

iconic cities on Earth.

Rio de Janeiro is dominated by great outcrops

of rock, pillars of the new world,

and they have an ancient origin.

They are the remains of great eruptions of magma

that date back to the time when South

America split from Africa, a very public divorce.

This great contorted landscape makes Rio spectacular and sexy,

but it also makes Mata Atlantica rich.

Right here, where continents ripped apart,

the landscape is made for rainforest diversity. ,

For every hill and every valley, there is a slightly

different formula for life.

And as rivers crash over great layers of volcanic rock,

they create further opportunity for life.

Since the age of the dinosaurs, it's

this unique geology that has been shaping Mata Atlantica.

As night falls, another strange creature

is about to emerge, further evidence for

the incredible diversity here.

An animal that, like the tamandua,

has also evolved an extra hand for climbing.

Well, he says it's for climbing.

A tree porcupine with a prehensile tail.

And if this is not strange enough,

there are at least four different species here.

One is very spiny, another not quite so,

and this one is hardly spiny at all, much more furry,

which seems pointless.

Pun intended.

Each a product of the slightly different

conditions in a slightly different patch of forest.

Since the age of the dinosaurs, the unique geological past

of Brazil's Atlantic forest has been shaping amazing life.

When it comes to plants, it is even

more diverse than the Amazon.

On every tree here, there are bromeliads, relatives

of the pineapple, which also originally

came from these forests.

They grow perched on tree branches high in the canopy

and catch all the water they need

from above channeling it with their pineapple like leaves

into a central pool.

And this one is a tiny egg.

After about 20 days, the egg starts to hatch, a tadpole.

Over the next few weeks, it grows legs, loses its tail,

and emerges into its own tiny plant penthouse

complete with pool and a view.

Up here there is water, shelter, and plenty of passing insects.

Yep, gotcha.

Life is so good, some frogs will spend their entire lives

in a single bromeliad, and over millennia

the frogs and the bromeliads have

evolved alongside each other.

Today, there are more than 1,000 species

of bromeliad, many harboring their own unique species

of frog.

But there are dangers even here.

I mean, I sense danger.

Yeah, there it is.

It was in this rich forest that the golden lion

tamarin found its niche.

This guy again.

30 million years after its African ancestors first

arrived, in Mata Atlantica it evolved

to become a unique species, but where other monkeys got bigger,

it stayed small.

A formula that works here though.

It's agility and dexterity are the perfect combination

for finding food in this infinitely complex three

dimensional world.

And they make up for their small size

by working together as a family, but their evolutionary journey

didn't stop there.

This may be the oldest forest in South America,

but it doesn't stand still.

Over time, it has been constantly changing.

When the Earth's climate gets wetter,

the forest spreads, even reconnecting with the Amazon.

And in drier times, it contracts, shrinking back

into small isolated pockets.

In isolation, life evolves in new directions,

and then the process repeats.

It's this change over time that is the final ingredient

for such diversity.

It has even changed the tamarin.

There are not one, but four different species

of lion tamarin in this forest and thousands of hairstyles

distinguished mainly by the color of their coats.

Their different faces, living proof of the power

of this ancient forest to shape life.

But recently, the forest has started

to change in a different way.

For millennia, the Mata Atlantica

has been a force for evolution, but now a different change

is coming to the forest.

The effect was slow at first, but as human populations grew,

so did the hunger for resources.

The rate of destruction completely

overtook the natural cycle of forest expansion.

In just a few hundred years, the forest

was reduced to a patchwork of isolated islands.

Today, less than 10% of Mata Atlantica is left.

Many of its species lost forever.

One of the most remarkable forests on Earth forgotten.

But in the few tiny pockets that remain

is a glimpse of what once was.

This patch of forest, the size of a dozen football fields,

contains one of the few remaining populations

of golden lion tamarins.

By the 1970s, only 300 golden lion tamarins were left.

Extinction was imminent, but now there is hope.

Thank goodness they're freaking cute.

These tamarins are being watched.

They can try and hide, but it won't work.

Some of the family are wearing radio collars.

Mostly they listen to classic rock,

and they've been marked with unique patterns

of dark hair dye to help identify

every precious individual.

In the 1970s, zoos around the world

started breeding programs to reintroduce tamarins

back to the wild, and ever since, conservationists have

been working day and night to protect

this icon of Mata Atlantica.

Monitoring like this is essential to ensure

the future of the species, and they've

made a dramatic comeback.

They're the Rocky Balboa's of tiny primates.

Today, there are over 3,000 tamarins living in the wild.

But bringing them back from the brink of extinction

is only the beginning of the battle.

That was a lot of Bs.

To ensure the future of the tamarins and all Mata

Atlantica's amazing inhabitants, the fragmented forest

must be reconnected, and now ambitious plans

are underway to do just that.

Not a moment too soon.

There are still remarkable discoveries here.

So when a totally new species of tree porcupine

appeared in 2013, people said, what the heck is that?

It was named Coendou speratus.

Speratus is Latin for hope.

Over millions of years, this forest has

been on a remarkable journey.

Enduring cataclysmic events, but always creating more life.

And its unique inhabitants survive

on the brink of extinction.

The hope is that the forgotten forest

will never be forgotten again.

I'm David Schwimmer and this has been more than I bargained for.

Seriously, I mean, this is a lot of work,

this mysterious planet thing.

Oh, you're welcome.

OK, I need some tea or something, guys.

Are we still recording?