A team of veterinary anatomists gets access to freshly dead giants that would otherwise never be examined this closely, from elephants and giraffes to whale sharks and sperm whales. Presenter Mark Evans works alongside anatomist Joy Reidenberg as she opens up carcasses on location, often in a farmyard or a coastal slipway rather than a lab, tracing how a heart the size of a barrel pumps blood up a giraffe's neck or how a whale's ear evolved to hear underwater. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins appears between dissections to place each discovery in its evolutionary context, connecting the animal on the table to its ancestors and relatives. The camera does not look away from the mess of a real dissection, and that is the point: the series argues that cutting an animal open tells you more about how evolution actually solved a problem than any diagram can. Each episode follows one species end to end, building toward a single anatomical mystery.