Lucy Cooke

Lucy Cooke is a British zoologist, author, television producer, director and presenter.

Education

Cooke read zoology at New College, Oxford, where she specialised in zoology and animal behaviour under Richard Dawkins.

Producer and Director

After working on the Jonathan Ross Show, Harry Enfield and other television comedy shows, Cooke began producing science, travel and history documentaries. She has produced episodes of The Lonely Planet, Crisis Demand, Aussies - Who Gives a XXXX, and was the series producer for The Recycled History of Recycling and Australia: Beyond the Fatal Shore.

Cooke directed and produced three episodes of Terry Jones' Medieval Lives, Tony Robinson Explores Australia, Balderdash and Piffle and You Don't Know You're Born. She wrote, produced and directed Final Chance to Save Jaguars with Bill Bailey and Meet the Sloths. The latter was virally successful, and led Cooke to found Slothville ,the Sloth Appreciation Society.

Television Presenter

Cooke produced and co-presented Freaks and Creeps, a series investigating the evolutionary history of some of the planet's ugliest animals, for National Geographic Wild in 2012. The following year, she co-presented the live broadcast Easter Eggs Live on Channel 4. She has also featured as a guest reporter on Springwatch .

Since 2014, Cooke has presented a number of animal-themed documentaries for the BBC, including Talk to the Animals (2014), Nature's Boldest Thieves (2015), Animals Unexpected (2015), Nature's Miracle Survivors (2016) and Ingenious Animals (2016). In Autumn 2016, she presented Amazing Animal Births for ITV1.

Author

Cooke is the author of two books about sloths, A Little Book of Sloth (2013) , The Power of Sloth (2014) . Her book, The Unexpected Truth About Animals: a Menagerie of the Misunderstood is due for publication in November 2017.