Walking with Dinosaurs

Imagine you could travel back in time, to a time long before man. Back across 65 million years. As you travel, you would see huge changes in the vegetation and the climate. Even the surface of the Earth itself would move, as mountain ranges are pushed up by colliding continents. Now you've reached a remarkable period in Earth's history known as the Cretaceous. It is a very different world. The Himalayas do not yet exist, and the Atlantic is only half as wide. There is no grass, only conifer forests and fern prairies. This is a world ruled by dinosaurs. Giant reptiles like Tyrannosaurus, a five-tonne predator, stalk the landscape. In Walking With Dinosaurs, we will show you how these magnificent creatures live. How they eat, fight and reproduce. And you will witness how the forces of nature conspire to drive these animals to extinction.

Walking with Dinosaurs, CC BY-SA 4.0

First light across the western hills of Earth's only continent, Pangaea. This world has been ruled by one group of giant reptiles for over 50 million years. But these ancient creatures have had their day. All over these lush fern prairies, a grim evolutionary battle has broken out among the newer types of reptile, for supremacy of this strange world. On these Triassic proving grounds, dinosaurs are still comparatively rare. But they are beginning to show the first signs of their future success.

Walking with Dinosaurs, CC BY-SA 4.0

[about the mammal-like reptiles] One day in the future, this strategy of investing in their young will pay off for their mammalian descendants. But as mammals evolve over the next 160 million years, they will only survive as a few small species, clinging on at the edge of a world dominated by dinosaurs.

Walking with Dinosaurs, CC BY-SA 4.0

20 million years later, a massive extinction wiped out thousands of species of reptile. But the dinosaurs went from strength to strength. Carnivores grew to enormous sizes, but their prey got even bigger. In the next program, we meet the giants of the Jurassic.

Walking with Dinosaurs, CC BY-SA 4.0

This is the Jurassic period, and the giant continent of Pangea that use to stretch from pole to pole is now breaking up. It is much wetter than the earlier Triassic period, and where there were once deserts, there are now vast forests of conifer trees.

Walking with Dinosaurs, CC BY-SA 4.0

There are vast open fern prairies, and this is were the titans of the Jurassic roam. Dinosaurs like Stegosaurus, with its distinctive row of spinal plates. These prairies are kept clear of trees by the constant grazing of such giant herbivorous. And none have a larger impact on this environment than the biggest dinosaurs of them all, the sauropods. There are many different types of these gigantic, long-necked creatures. These are Diplodocus, the longest of them all.

Walking with Dinosaurs, CC BY-SA 4.0