Documentary / Biography

What could we do if we had evidence terrorists were close to acquiring nuclear weapons, or even making their own? How would we defend ourselves from a blast with fireballs hotter than the sun? Today, defiant nations desperately pursue them, while at home, agencies...

Campaigning for 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln arrived onto the national stage as "Honest Abe." But was he really a simple frontiersman or a brilliant strategist who manipulated his public image, using newspapers, photography and even folksy imagery to win over...

Treating fossils and footprints like crime scene evidence, Dr. Phil Manning employs crime scene technology to create a 3-D virtual world of one of the most spectacular dino stomping grounds on the globe. Episodes include In Living Color, Megasaurus, T. Rex Trauma, In the...

Europa an icy moon of Jupiter over 480 million miles away from Earth may be our best hope for finding alien life in our solar system. Scientists believe that on Europa there is a liquid ocean buried beneath its icy crust. To find out...

Would you hug a killer whale? Or feed a lion its lunch by hand? It's all in a day's work for these wildlife specialists and the creatures that count on them for their survival. You'll visit a rhinoceros sanctuary in Kenya and see how...

Go behind the scenes at Moscow's Circus School and experience the magic and wonder of the performances that delight millions. See lion tamers risk life and limb, trapeze artists glide through the air, of course, the beloved clowns who inspire imagination and fantasy. With...

This serpent will hold you spellbound! Tread softly into the jungle realm of a legendary monarch the King Cobra. Swift, strong, and surprisingly deadly, it delivers enough venom in one bite to kill a hundred people, yet it solely preys on other snakes. Its...

Scattered across the island of Sicily, beneath picturesque churches, are thousands of mummified bodies. And most mysterious of all is one of the last to be enshrined: she's known as the "sleeping beauty" Rosalia Lombardo. A child barely two years old when she died...

For over 500 million years, the jellyfish has survived in our oceans. Today, global warming and pollution may be contributing to a population explosion, as billions of these sometimes venomous creatures increasingly swarm around our beaches and shorelines. And though they have no bones,...

National Geographic takes you to the front lines of Darwin, Australia, where a serious confrontation is about to break out. On one side are the cane toads, whose venom threatens to destroy the continent lethal to both man and other animals. On the other...

Enter the realm of the monster snake! Enormous snakes hungry caimans frenzied piranhas a barefoot biologist! Jesus Rivas takes off his shoes to study giant anacondas in the swampy heart of Venezuela. He's searching for the slippery skin of the world's largest snake. Anacondas...

Take a spectacular journey. It starts right here with Jewels of the Caribbean Sea. Tour the depths of the Caribbean where, in waters famed for hidden treasures, another kind of wealth lies in abundance. From the coral reefs, across the plains, and through the...

Probably no one knows chimpanzees better than Jane Goodall. She lived with them in the African Forest for over thirty years! Come visit Jane in Tanzania and meet some amazing human like chimps; there's dignified David Graybeard, who dives into Jane's box of bananas,...

A 300 pound Komodo dragon. Pythons that can swallow an adult whole. 20-foot crocs. Is it possible that under the right conditions, they could get a whole lot bigger?

Humanly Impossible debunks the mysteries behind human acts that seem to defy the laws of nature. From a stuntman who can rest the entire weight of his body on a spear to a glass eater who chomps light bulbs, National Geographic examines extreme performers...

Across the Himalayas are stories of the yeti, or abominable snowman. Half man, half ape, the yeti is said to roam only the most remote peaks, where people rarely venture. National Geographic joins veteran explorer and climber Gerry Moffatt as he sets out to...

Kids can't get enough of dinosaurs-- especially when National Geographic takes them on site and behind the latest dinosaur discoveries to rock the world! Full of fun and learning this dinosaur bonanza joins two actual dinosaur hunts where kids can Dig for unknown dinosaurs...

Science may be on the verge of producing a limitless supply of replacement parts by regenerating damaged or aging body parts grown from our own cells. Imagine the implications if we could custom make body parts genetically indistinguishable from our own. Could it eliminate...

Animal domestication was a major prerequisite for human civilization to evolve. Join National Geographic as we explore how a dramatic shift from wild to tame happened by investigating foxes, chickens, dogs and rats. Travel to Siberia to see how the physiology of foxes changes...

Nero is accused of having "fiddled while Rome burned" and remembered for executing his mother and burning Christians alive. History has sided against him on all counts, but could there be another side to ancient Rome's notorious emperor? National Geographic reveals how Nero rebuilt...

Whales are the largest, most intelligent, most enigmatic hunters in the sea. Humpback whales are icons of their kind. Centuries of slaughter pushed them to the brink of extinction but they've made a comeback. In an effort to learn what these whales need to...

AirVenture Oshkosh is the largest air show on the planet, with more than 10,000 aircraft and more than half a million people. Viewers get an insider's perspective when National Geographic flies along with the world's best aerobatic pilots as they twist and tumble through...

Since the days of the Roman Empire, Italy's Mount Vesuvius has erupted more than 50 times, devastating whole cities and towns. At Herculaneum, archaeologists found human skeletons in a fatal embrace. Although Vesuvius is sleeping now, this active volcano is never far from the...

In the 1990s, a high Himalayan cave in Upper Mustang, Nepal, was discovered that contained 42 ancient people, buried on wooden bunk beds. American archaeologist, Dr. Mark Aldenderfer, believes there must be more burial caves but the challenge is how to find them, deep...

Professional cheaters have come a long way from counting cards. Today, modern gadgets including lasers and microcomputers are helping them beat the house. Meet a former cheater who used a light-wand to swindle $1 million from slot machines. Then, at the Aria Hotel and...

Archaeologist Jeff Rose is on a journey to understand how the filling of the Persian Gulf basin might have become the inspiration for one of the greatest stories - the story of Noah's Ark and the Biblical flood.

In Greensboro, North Carolina, an argument over a song playing on the jukebox at a Mexican restaurant ends with two brothers dead--shot dead at point blank range. The culprit is a member of the notorious transnational gang MS-13. How did a gang that started...

A monster mining truck, the iconic Yankee Stadium, an Italian bridge and more: all feats of engineering in their time, but now they've reached the end of the line. Join expert demolition crews as they take on the challenges and dangers of some of...

Wildlife expert Casey Anderson and his best friend, a 900-pound brown bear named Brutus return for a second season of Expedition Wild, where Casey treks deep into America's oldest national park and immerses himself into the daily lives of the park's inhabitants. Casey returns...

Muscles: National Geographic investigates the science of muscle by taking a journey inside the bodies of two remarkable humans with startling muscular disorders. 31-year old Jason Dunn lives with Dystonia, a rare disease that causes his brain to send faulty messages to his muscular...

The mysterious death of hundreds of hippos at the Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda sparks a "whodunit" on an international scale. What begins with the unusual discovery of two dead hippos escalates out of control and within a matter of months, hundreds of...

Taller than Shaquille O'Neal, he could kill a human with a single swipe of his paw. He is an 800-pound grizzly bear named Brutus, and the curious companion to renowned naturalist Casey Anderson, who has raised him since birth. Casey has dedicated himself to...

Chimpanzees are our closest genetic relatives, with DNA over 98% the same as ours. They can learn from those around them in ways many other animals can't and when they're captive, they become even more human-like. But is a new form of chimp adapting...

Ten years ago, anthropologist Johan Reinhard, accompanied by Argentine and Peruvian colleagues, uncovered a sacred site at 22,000-feet on Mt. Llullaillaco. Beneath rock and ice, they discovered three Inca children each perfectly preserved. A six-year-old girl, a seven-year-old boy and a 15-year-old teenager they...

Every day hundreds of creatures live and play in the pristine waters of California's spectacular Channel Islands. But El Nino's warm temperatures and raging storms the worst in more than 15 years cast a wave of destruction over this remarkable life-giving kelp forest and...

Travel to Lijiang and learn about life in China of the 1990s. At first, this small town may seem strange to you and its residents very different, but you'll quickly discover that people in Lijiang care about the same kinds of things as you....

An eruption of Santorini some 3,600 years ago was one of the largest, yet most mysterious, natural calamities in human history and may have wiped out an entire civilization. Much of the evidence of its destruction has been lost at sea until now. National...

Deep in the heart of Texas, a community wages war against an unrelenting species of fire ants. These fearsome invaders are ravaging the land, the animals, and even the people. Their stings kill wildlife and maim farm animals. Nothing seems to stop them. They're...

On August 28, an early Sunday morning, America woke up to a shocking surprise. Katrina, a moderate "category one" hurricane that recently skirted Florida, had blown up and had become into a "category five" killer and it was headed straight for New Orleans. Join...

By night, they're ruthless hunters that stalk their prey with a keen sense of sight and smell. By day, they're playful, loving companions for millions. Today, cats outnumber dogs as America's favorite pet. Worshipped in ancient Egypt and persecuted during medieval times, domestic cats...

The everyday life of a Baka family in the forests of Cameroon is examined--and found to be remarkably similar to life in modern society. Few people have the knowledge and ingenuity to survive in this difficult environment. The Baka have an extraordinary knowledge of...

Henry Rollins explores the complex relationship between humans and animals by investigating dangerous and seemingly taboo practices around the world in the three-part series Animal Underworld.

2011 has been a year of unprecedented natural disasters; from the killer tsunami in Japan to earthquakes in Christchurch and Thailand. But it all began in Australia, when weeks of torrential rain and cyclones battered much of the country. After a decade of crippling...

Animal Mega Moves is an action-packed adventure series following specialist teams of animal movers, vets and transport engineers as they attempt to relocate different families of animals across the globe by air, sea, train and road. The movers are big thinking, larger than life...

It's the most famous military installation in the world, yet it doesnt officially exist. Area 51-- a site for covert Cold War operations-- has long been a magnet for crackpots, conspiracy theorists, and the overly curious. While there may not be truth to the...

A massive one-eyed monster lurking in the Amazon. A freakish desert creature spraying acid and delivering electric shocks. An ape-like creature walking upright in the Indonesian jungle. These are the monsters of persistent myth and legend and may just be based on real creatures....

Avalanche! This fierce force of nature can snap trees as if they were twigs, reduce houses to rubble, and kill anyone unlucky enough to stand in the way.

Ancient human grave sites speak volumes to those who listen. These haunting human "time capsules" have been uncovered all over the world. Some even reach a certain level of fame: The Ampato maiden sacrificed on an Andes peak. The Alpine Ice Man, the oldest...

Recently, paleontologists unearthed the fossilized remains of a 35-foot, 240 million-year-old ichthyosaur in Nevada's Augusta Mountains and instantly knew this creature would have been the ocean's top predator. Join the investigation as scientists attempt to understand where this unique creature fits in the evolutionary...

National Geographic follows experts as they investigate myths and legends to determine the truth behind ancient history's earliest stories. Travelling around the globe mysteries are unveiled about the Holy Grail, Christ's burial cloth, and the Philosopher's Stone.