Lots more pictures from Skandar’s visit to William Tyndale School as part of The Great Plant Hunt campaign have been added to the gallery!

Launched in 2008, Connect2earth, an online environmental community where you can tell the world why you care about the environment and why it should be protected is now entering a new phase.

The new service links you directly with friends and the world’s top environmental experts to discuss renewable energy, the species extinction crisis and climate change among other topics. You can debate, learn and share information by posting text, images, audio and video material and then follow the discussion live as it plays out on the web or on your mobile phone.

connect2earth community members, together with a jury of green experts, will then pick a winning contribution. The winner could win a trip to be part of an official delegation to the United Nations climate negotiations in Copenhagen later this year, or even get first-hand experience on a conservation project somewhere in the world.

Skandar is urging you to go www.connect2earth.org for your say in the future of our planet!

Skandar recently went to track down the Grey Wolf in the Jura Mountains, Switzerland as part of his work-shadowing with IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature).

Information about his trip can be found at the Wild Talk site www.iucn.org/wildtalk as well as an audio interview with wolf expert Jean-Marc Landry and Deputy Head of IUCN’s Species Programme, Jean-Christophe Vi? which can be downloaded HERE (right click > save target as).

New photos have also appeared on Skandar’s official site as well as another from his visit to William Tyndale School and can be found in the gallery.

Teenager with Darwin link stars in Narnia films

ON SCREEN he’s the bad-boy traitor who sold out his siblings to the White Witch in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

In real life, Highbury schoolboy Skandar Keynes is a teenage Hollywood hearthrob and all-round over-achiever who counts Charles Darwin, economist John Maynard Keynes, politician Tony Benn and King Edward I among his ancestors.

Seventeen-year-old Skandar brought a touch of adventure to William Tyndale School in Islington on Wednesday when he presented a treasure chest to help children emulate some of his great-great-great grandfather Charles Darwin’s simpler experiments. Skandar, a former pupil of Thornhill Primary School in Barnsbury who now attends City of London School, is studying sciences at A-level. Speaking exclusively to the Tribune, he said: “I’m doing biology, chemistry, maths, further maths and history. When I was choosing I thought I enjoy sciences. They’re not something I can pick up on in the future like English literature.”
He is determined that filming – work on a third Narnia film starts in Australia in July – will not distract him from his studies. “It’s not too hard to focus on work,” he said. The visit to William Tyndale was arranged to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. He said: “My dad asked if I wanted to do this. I know a little about Darwin. I believe in everything he said. It wasn’t really stressed on me but I’ve been aware of it.”

The treasure chest, provided under a joint project between the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, contains stickers, a plant press, a mini-seed bank and other resources to help children take part in Kew’s Great Plant Hunt. William Tyndale is the only school in Islington to receive a treasure chest.
Headteacher Tanya Watson said: “The children absolutely loved it. For them it was a terrific chance to have a well-known child actor and direct descendant of Darwin visit. “Anything that makes science a more creative experience for children has got to be good. It’s about opening children’s minds even more, keeping awareness of the world around them and not just seeing science as a Key Stage 2 Sats paper.” Angela McFarlane, from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, said: “The project celebrates Darwin the scientist and shows children that, although he was a genius, the way he did science used simple techniques, looking carefully at what’s around him. “They can go out and do some of the things Darwin did. They can send the information they find to Kew. We’re going to be making the world’s largest collection of daisy seeds which our scientists at Kew will be experimenting on.”

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A huge thanks to NarniaLatino.org, we now have some of the new photoshoot images in HQ! Click below to see them. (Note – the thumbnails still have the watermarks on them for some reason, but the full images don’t have watermarks anymore).

Skandar has been nominated for two awards at this years Young Artists Awards. He is in the running for ‘Leading Young Actor (Best Performance in a Feature Film)’ alongside Josh Hutcherson, Freddie Highmore and Nate Hartley. The cast of Prince Caspian have also been nominated for ‘Young Ensemble Cast (Best Performance in a Feature Film)’.

The ceremony takes place at Globe Theatre at Universal Studios, Universal City with the winners being announced on March 29th.

Variety and The L.A. Times are reporting that 20th Century Fox has picked up the option to co-finance Walden Media’s The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader just a month after Disney decided to pass on helping to finance the third film in the series. Budgeting and script issues are being worked out although there’s hope that the film will start shooting at the end of summer for a planned holiday 2010 release through the Fox Walden label.

Fox and Walden will split the production and P&A costs for “Dawn Treader,” which is projected to have a $140 million budget, down from the $215 million spent on last year’s The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. “Caspian” grossed $419 million worldwide, compared to the $745 million earned by its predecessor “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.”

As planned, the third film will be directed by Michael Apted with Mark Johnson and original director Andrew Adamson co-producing. Ben Barnes, Skandar Keynes and Georgie Henley will be returning as Prince Caspian, Edmund and Lucy while Will Poulter from Garth Jennings’ Son of Rambow will play Eustace Clarence Scrubb.

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