We know him as a ubiquitous presence in some of the world's finest nature documentaries, but there's another side of David Attenborough revealed in Lost Worlds Vanished Lives: his lifelong passion for fossils. He tells us in Episode 1 how he collected fossils as a child, and it's evident from his visits to fossil sites and talks with palaeontologists in this series that his enthusiasm hasn't faded with age.

In the four episodes of this excellent series, Attenborough gives an overview of the various ways in which fossils were originally formed, and how palaeontologists find them and then excavate and clean them to reveal their details. The series was originally shown in 1989, so the science on show might not be as cutting-edge as it was back then, but the principles are still the same. It's instructive to see palaeontologists X-raying a piece of slate to reveal the image of an ancient starfish, or CT (computer tomography) scanning a fossil head to see the internal shape of the brain-case. The close-up views this documentary provides of actual fossils are breathtaking.

Attenborough takes us all over the world, showing us amber miners in South America, fossil hunters in Scotland, and the site of the Burgess Shale in Canada, where soft-bodied animals that were contemporaneous with trilobites are miraculously preserved. We see palaeontologists in New Mexico, excavating a huge dinosaur encased 20 m into the rock. Later, another palaeontologist shows us an unhatched dinosaur egg he has processed to reveal the embryo within.

Tracks left by ancient beasts are fascinating, too, from the trails of a two-metre-long millipede in the cliffs of the Isle of Arran, Scotland, to the dimple where a trilobite sat at the bottom of ancient seas, and the marks it made as it moved off. Mammals are not ignored; we see spaniel-sized horses revealed in the oil shales in Germany.

Not only is Attenborough present throughout this documentary series, but his inimical hand is also readily evident in the quality writing, making it a must for fossil — and Attenborough — fanatics.