For decades, Sir David Attenborough and his television descendants have been creeping ever-closer to the natural world to show it off to viewers in all its glory.

But the BBC will next year go one step further, as it commissions 34 hyper-realistic animatronic spy creatures to go undercover in the animal world.

A new BBC natural history show will see life-like animals from baby crocodiles to adult orangutans infiltrate the jungles, deserts and grasslands of the planet, in an attempt to assimilate into wild families.

The results, programme-makers say, will prove once and for all that animals experience the same emotions and relationships to humans.