Prehistoric Planet (2022) s02e01 Episode Script
Islands
Dinosaurs ruled the planet
for over 150 million years.
They occupied almost every corner
of the globe
and came in almost
every shape and size imaginable.
Some were truly extraordinary.
We now know that T. rex was
a powerful swimmer.
Velociraptors were cunning,
feathered hunters,
and that some dinosaurs had
the most bizarre behavior.
But new discoveries
are being made almost every day
that tell us more about life
on this planet 66 million years ago.
This time on Prehistoric Planet,
we reveal new animals
and new insight
into their quest to find a partner,
the challenges faced by raising a family
and their titanic battles.
Journey to a time
when nature put on its greatest show.
This is Prehistoric Planet 2.
The mouth of a river in southern Europe
66 million years ago.
In the aftermath of a tropical storm,
debris is drifting downstream.
And amongst the wreckage,
rafts of vegetation ripped from the land.
For a weary pterosaur, this one may be
but it's far from safe.
A huge mosasaur,
a deadly underwater hunter,
is looking for an easy meal.
Such as this little dinosaur, Zalmoxes.
Staying here is too risky.
He needs a larger raft, and quickly.
There's little choice but to swim for it.
He is not the first here.
Another castaway.
A female.
Their raft is drifting out to sea.
Sometimes, castaways on rafts like these
are washed up on the shores
of the distant islands.
If they're very lucky,
this pair could become pioneers.
And may establish a new population,
unlike anything seen before.
The longer an island has been isolated,
the more different its animal inhabitants
may become.
These small islands in southern Europe
are home to a strange,
rather shy hadrosaur.
Feeding amongst these pine saplings,
Tethyshadros.
Just a quarter of the size
of its giant cousins on the mainland,
it stands no taller than a human being.
With its unique serrated bill,
it can forage among the tough vegetation.
Hunters like T. rex have never reached
this little island,
so it should be a safe place
for a mother to raise her brood.
But not necessarily.
Hatzegopteryx.
Giant predatory pterosaurs.
The best chance of escape
is beneath the canopy of the taller trees.
These small calves have been left behind
among the saplings.
Mother and young are separated.
Hatzegopteryx
are very intelligent pterosaurs.
Now that the element of surprise has gone,
they change tactics.
Spreading out across the clearing,
they try to flush out any prey
that might still be there.
The youngsters' best hope
and not to run.
These two are lucky
to be back with their mother.
The island-hopping pterosaurs move on
to try their luck elsewhere.
The hadrosaurs can return to feeding.
The island of Madagascar
has been separated
from the African mainland
for 80 million years.
So long that most of its animals
are now very different
from any to be found elsewhere.
This is Simosuchus.
It's not a dinosaur
but a miniature relative of crocodiles.
One that lives almost entirely on land
and is strictly vegetarian.
Simosuchus have tough, armored bodies
which protect them from attack
by the island's predators.
sometimes.
Majungasaurus, Madagascar's top hunter.
This particular female
is blind in one eye,
so she finds it hard to make a kill,
and she's now very hungry.
The Simosuchus have a network
of escape routes
that lead them
to their underground burrows.
Once inside, they block the entrance
with their heavily armored backs.
This little male is unlucky.
But he's not helpless.
Reverse charges,
tail swipes and aggressive kicks.
The hunter's snout is too broad
to reach very far inside.
But just to be on the safe side,
the Simosuchus digs even deeper.
For the Majungasaurus,
yet another hunt has ended in failure.
Simosuchus is not the only evolutionary
oddity to thrive on Madagascar.
The island is also home to another group
of very unusual animals.
Mammals.
This is a female Adalatherium.
She's less than two feet long.
But even so, she's still one of
the largest mammals to have yet evolved.
She spends most of her waking hours
searching for food.
potentially a rich source of protein.
But she doesn't eat
this particular clutch.
These are her own eggs.
And this is her burrow.
The eggs are starting to hatch.
The hatchlings' eyes have not yet opened,
but instinctively, they head
towards their mother to feed on milk.
She produces it
from modified sweat glands on her belly,
and for now, it's all the food they need.
Two months later, and the cubs
have more than quadrupled in size.
To produce enough milk for them,
their mother must herself
eat a great deal.
So every night, she has to leave
the safety of the den in order to feed.
Her eyesight,
like that of many burrowing animals,
is not very sensitive.
She relies instead on her acute hearing.
And if she hears something
that might be dangerous,
she stays perfectly still.
Trouble avoided.
She returns to searching
in the earth for roots and seeds.
The cubs are growing fast
and so are their appetites.
The female is now having to search
almost nonstop for food.
So her cubs are left unguarded
for hours at a time.
Masiakasaurus.
A hunter.
And one particularly well-adapted
for catching burrowing prey.
With its long neck and narrow head,
it can investigate any hole
that might contain a meal.
But hunters may themselves
become the hunted.
Madtsoia, a snake nearly 25 feet long,
squeezes its prey to death.
This neighborhood
has now become rather dangerous.
As night falls, the mother leads her young
out of the burrow for the very first time.
For now, at least,
they must stay close together.
In the far south of the planet,
on the islands of the Antarctic Peninsula,
winter brings
months of freezing temperatures.
Here, too,
being part of a family brings benefits.
A thermal camera
reveals a huddle of glowing bodies.
Imperobator.
Hunters.
Like most dinosaurs,
they are warm-blooded.
But to stay warm, they need a lot of food.
So they must make a kill
every few days if they can.
Fresh snow muffles
the sound of their footsteps,
enabling them to move undetected
through the forest in search of prey.
A Morrosaurus.
A plant eater for whom winter
is inevitably a very hard time.
Imperobators specialize
in hunting such prey.
The Morrosaurus
is faster than its pursuers.
But it's outnumbered by the pack.
The Imperobators' long-feathered tails
give them remarkable maneuverability.
The chase has reached
the very edge of the forest.
Beyond lies a frozen lake,
half a mile wide.
The clear, open space could give
the faster Morrosaurus an advantage.
But the frozen surface is treacherous.
With the Imperobator closing in,
it isn't much of a choice.
A misplaced step.
A chance for the Morrosaurus
to sprint beyond the predators' reach.
But this is an island,
so hunters and hunted
will almost certainly meet again.
Some islands are so small
that they have
no large land-living residents.
But they may, nonetheless, get visitors.
Hatzegopteryx.
This male has arrived
carrying a 40-pound Tethyshadros carcass.
A prize from a recent hunt.
He is 15 feet tall,
with a wingspan of over 30 feet.
Hatzegopteryx are Europe's top predators.
But this male has come here to reveal
another side to his character.
He has constructed a display to make it
clear to any females passing overhead
that he is looking for a mate.
But he might have a very long wait
before he gets a response.
At last. A female.
She seems interested,
but a little more persuasion
might be necessary.
And he needs to be careful.
One well-aimed peck from her beak
could quickly bring
his whole mating season to an end.
His display must demonstrate
that he has the good genes
that her young would do well to inherit.
The dead dinosaur suggests
that he's a good hunter
and carrying it here
has proved that he's a strong flyer.
But if she is impressed,
she isn't showing it yet.
Time to produce
some new evidence of his eligibility.
Head lifts invite her to come closer.
Now, she gives him a little encouragement.
A synchronized dance
creates trust between them.
Another male.
He's much younger,
but he could still be a rival.
That's him dealt with.
Disaster. The female has left.
He may have lost his chance.
She's back.
Seeing off a potential rival
might even be another point in his favor.
He continues from where he left off.
One last reminder of his strength.
And this is his only contribution
to fatherhood.
It's all over in just a few seconds.
But it's the start of the next generation
of these giant flying hunters.
Islands like this may only be small,
but like countless others
around the world,
they bear witness to crucial moments
in the lives of some
of the most unusual creatures
on the Prehistoric Planet.
During the time of the dinosaurs,
the skies were dominated
by flying reptiles called pterosaurs.
and some of them were enormous.
One of the most interesting,
because they're the most bizarre,
are the azhdarchid pterosaurs.
And to try and describe
what an azhdarchid pterosaur is like
is very difficult.
They stand as tall as giraffes.
They've got heads
that may have been two meters long,
wingspans of ten meters.
They're some of the most bizarre things
who've ever evolved on Earth.
Despite their size,
these giants were well-adapted for flight.
So why do we think
they hunted on the ground?
The azhdarchid's wing is a skin membrane
supported entirely
by a superenlarged fourth finger.
This skin membrane extended
from the tip of that giant fourth finger
all the way to the top of the hind leg.
Azhdarchids were supremely adapted
for covering great distance,
but they weren't the kind of animals
that were twisting and turning
and making agile movements
actually in flight.
This would've made it hard for azhdarchids
to catch other flying animals.
They must have
had a different way to hunt.
One of the most prevalent ideas about how
azhdarchid pterosaurs may have fed
is by using this bizarre mechanism
of foraging known as skim feeding.
Today, birds
like black skimmers feed in this way.
It's the most ridiculous way
of getting your food you can imagine.
It's literally pushing your lower jaw
through the water
and crashing into your food.
A skimmer's neck
is built to absorb sudden impacts.
But fossils reveal azhdarchids
had none of these adaptations.
In fact, they would almost certainly
break their necks from just the strain
of trying to push their lower jaws
through the water.
An azhdarchid had no option.
It must have landed to find food.
But could it really walk
fast enough to hunt?
Scientists needed evidence
to persuade them
that they could do anything more
than just waddle.
That evidence comes
from 66-million-year-old footprints.
The biggest pterosaur track
in the world was made
by a walking giant azhdarchid.
That's not only a cool thing to have,
it tells us an awful lot
about how efficient they were at walking.
These tracks show
they held their limbs
directly under their body,
giving them an upright stance.
Their feet were padded.
And unlike the small pterosaurs,
their long legs
gave them an enormous stride.
Although azhdarchids
are peculiar-looking animals,
they're moving very efficiently.
Azhdarchids combined
this competent terrestrial walking ability
with this massive long stork-like face.
They almost certainly were predators
that walked around reaching down
to grab animals.
We have to remember, though,
the throat size of this thing
is half a meter wide.
That's about the width of my shoulders.
We would be on the menu for these things
if they were alive today.
Pterosaurs would have been
an awe-inspiring sight in the sky.
But these giants were even more impressive
and terrifying on the ground.
for over 150 million years.
They occupied almost every corner
of the globe
and came in almost
every shape and size imaginable.
Some were truly extraordinary.
We now know that T. rex was
a powerful swimmer.
Velociraptors were cunning,
feathered hunters,
and that some dinosaurs had
the most bizarre behavior.
But new discoveries
are being made almost every day
that tell us more about life
on this planet 66 million years ago.
This time on Prehistoric Planet,
we reveal new animals
and new insight
into their quest to find a partner,
the challenges faced by raising a family
and their titanic battles.
Journey to a time
when nature put on its greatest show.
This is Prehistoric Planet 2.
The mouth of a river in southern Europe
66 million years ago.
In the aftermath of a tropical storm,
debris is drifting downstream.
And amongst the wreckage,
rafts of vegetation ripped from the land.
For a weary pterosaur, this one may be
but it's far from safe.
A huge mosasaur,
a deadly underwater hunter,
is looking for an easy meal.
Such as this little dinosaur, Zalmoxes.
Staying here is too risky.
He needs a larger raft, and quickly.
There's little choice but to swim for it.
He is not the first here.
Another castaway.
A female.
Their raft is drifting out to sea.
Sometimes, castaways on rafts like these
are washed up on the shores
of the distant islands.
If they're very lucky,
this pair could become pioneers.
And may establish a new population,
unlike anything seen before.
The longer an island has been isolated,
the more different its animal inhabitants
may become.
These small islands in southern Europe
are home to a strange,
rather shy hadrosaur.
Feeding amongst these pine saplings,
Tethyshadros.
Just a quarter of the size
of its giant cousins on the mainland,
it stands no taller than a human being.
With its unique serrated bill,
it can forage among the tough vegetation.
Hunters like T. rex have never reached
this little island,
so it should be a safe place
for a mother to raise her brood.
But not necessarily.
Hatzegopteryx.
Giant predatory pterosaurs.
The best chance of escape
is beneath the canopy of the taller trees.
These small calves have been left behind
among the saplings.
Mother and young are separated.
Hatzegopteryx
are very intelligent pterosaurs.
Now that the element of surprise has gone,
they change tactics.
Spreading out across the clearing,
they try to flush out any prey
that might still be there.
The youngsters' best hope
and not to run.
These two are lucky
to be back with their mother.
The island-hopping pterosaurs move on
to try their luck elsewhere.
The hadrosaurs can return to feeding.
The island of Madagascar
has been separated
from the African mainland
for 80 million years.
So long that most of its animals
are now very different
from any to be found elsewhere.
This is Simosuchus.
It's not a dinosaur
but a miniature relative of crocodiles.
One that lives almost entirely on land
and is strictly vegetarian.
Simosuchus have tough, armored bodies
which protect them from attack
by the island's predators.
sometimes.
Majungasaurus, Madagascar's top hunter.
This particular female
is blind in one eye,
so she finds it hard to make a kill,
and she's now very hungry.
The Simosuchus have a network
of escape routes
that lead them
to their underground burrows.
Once inside, they block the entrance
with their heavily armored backs.
This little male is unlucky.
But he's not helpless.
Reverse charges,
tail swipes and aggressive kicks.
The hunter's snout is too broad
to reach very far inside.
But just to be on the safe side,
the Simosuchus digs even deeper.
For the Majungasaurus,
yet another hunt has ended in failure.
Simosuchus is not the only evolutionary
oddity to thrive on Madagascar.
The island is also home to another group
of very unusual animals.
Mammals.
This is a female Adalatherium.
She's less than two feet long.
But even so, she's still one of
the largest mammals to have yet evolved.
She spends most of her waking hours
searching for food.
potentially a rich source of protein.
But she doesn't eat
this particular clutch.
These are her own eggs.
And this is her burrow.
The eggs are starting to hatch.
The hatchlings' eyes have not yet opened,
but instinctively, they head
towards their mother to feed on milk.
She produces it
from modified sweat glands on her belly,
and for now, it's all the food they need.
Two months later, and the cubs
have more than quadrupled in size.
To produce enough milk for them,
their mother must herself
eat a great deal.
So every night, she has to leave
the safety of the den in order to feed.
Her eyesight,
like that of many burrowing animals,
is not very sensitive.
She relies instead on her acute hearing.
And if she hears something
that might be dangerous,
she stays perfectly still.
Trouble avoided.
She returns to searching
in the earth for roots and seeds.
The cubs are growing fast
and so are their appetites.
The female is now having to search
almost nonstop for food.
So her cubs are left unguarded
for hours at a time.
Masiakasaurus.
A hunter.
And one particularly well-adapted
for catching burrowing prey.
With its long neck and narrow head,
it can investigate any hole
that might contain a meal.
But hunters may themselves
become the hunted.
Madtsoia, a snake nearly 25 feet long,
squeezes its prey to death.
This neighborhood
has now become rather dangerous.
As night falls, the mother leads her young
out of the burrow for the very first time.
For now, at least,
they must stay close together.
In the far south of the planet,
on the islands of the Antarctic Peninsula,
winter brings
months of freezing temperatures.
Here, too,
being part of a family brings benefits.
A thermal camera
reveals a huddle of glowing bodies.
Imperobator.
Hunters.
Like most dinosaurs,
they are warm-blooded.
But to stay warm, they need a lot of food.
So they must make a kill
every few days if they can.
Fresh snow muffles
the sound of their footsteps,
enabling them to move undetected
through the forest in search of prey.
A Morrosaurus.
A plant eater for whom winter
is inevitably a very hard time.
Imperobators specialize
in hunting such prey.
The Morrosaurus
is faster than its pursuers.
But it's outnumbered by the pack.
The Imperobators' long-feathered tails
give them remarkable maneuverability.
The chase has reached
the very edge of the forest.
Beyond lies a frozen lake,
half a mile wide.
The clear, open space could give
the faster Morrosaurus an advantage.
But the frozen surface is treacherous.
With the Imperobator closing in,
it isn't much of a choice.
A misplaced step.
A chance for the Morrosaurus
to sprint beyond the predators' reach.
But this is an island,
so hunters and hunted
will almost certainly meet again.
Some islands are so small
that they have
no large land-living residents.
But they may, nonetheless, get visitors.
Hatzegopteryx.
This male has arrived
carrying a 40-pound Tethyshadros carcass.
A prize from a recent hunt.
He is 15 feet tall,
with a wingspan of over 30 feet.
Hatzegopteryx are Europe's top predators.
But this male has come here to reveal
another side to his character.
He has constructed a display to make it
clear to any females passing overhead
that he is looking for a mate.
But he might have a very long wait
before he gets a response.
At last. A female.
She seems interested,
but a little more persuasion
might be necessary.
And he needs to be careful.
One well-aimed peck from her beak
could quickly bring
his whole mating season to an end.
His display must demonstrate
that he has the good genes
that her young would do well to inherit.
The dead dinosaur suggests
that he's a good hunter
and carrying it here
has proved that he's a strong flyer.
But if she is impressed,
she isn't showing it yet.
Time to produce
some new evidence of his eligibility.
Head lifts invite her to come closer.
Now, she gives him a little encouragement.
A synchronized dance
creates trust between them.
Another male.
He's much younger,
but he could still be a rival.
That's him dealt with.
Disaster. The female has left.
He may have lost his chance.
She's back.
Seeing off a potential rival
might even be another point in his favor.
He continues from where he left off.
One last reminder of his strength.
And this is his only contribution
to fatherhood.
It's all over in just a few seconds.
But it's the start of the next generation
of these giant flying hunters.
Islands like this may only be small,
but like countless others
around the world,
they bear witness to crucial moments
in the lives of some
of the most unusual creatures
on the Prehistoric Planet.
During the time of the dinosaurs,
the skies were dominated
by flying reptiles called pterosaurs.
and some of them were enormous.
One of the most interesting,
because they're the most bizarre,
are the azhdarchid pterosaurs.
And to try and describe
what an azhdarchid pterosaur is like
is very difficult.
They stand as tall as giraffes.
They've got heads
that may have been two meters long,
wingspans of ten meters.
They're some of the most bizarre things
who've ever evolved on Earth.
Despite their size,
these giants were well-adapted for flight.
So why do we think
they hunted on the ground?
The azhdarchid's wing is a skin membrane
supported entirely
by a superenlarged fourth finger.
This skin membrane extended
from the tip of that giant fourth finger
all the way to the top of the hind leg.
Azhdarchids were supremely adapted
for covering great distance,
but they weren't the kind of animals
that were twisting and turning
and making agile movements
actually in flight.
This would've made it hard for azhdarchids
to catch other flying animals.
They must have
had a different way to hunt.
One of the most prevalent ideas about how
azhdarchid pterosaurs may have fed
is by using this bizarre mechanism
of foraging known as skim feeding.
Today, birds
like black skimmers feed in this way.
It's the most ridiculous way
of getting your food you can imagine.
It's literally pushing your lower jaw
through the water
and crashing into your food.
A skimmer's neck
is built to absorb sudden impacts.
But fossils reveal azhdarchids
had none of these adaptations.
In fact, they would almost certainly
break their necks from just the strain
of trying to push their lower jaws
through the water.
An azhdarchid had no option.
It must have landed to find food.
But could it really walk
fast enough to hunt?
Scientists needed evidence
to persuade them
that they could do anything more
than just waddle.
That evidence comes
from 66-million-year-old footprints.
The biggest pterosaur track
in the world was made
by a walking giant azhdarchid.
That's not only a cool thing to have,
it tells us an awful lot
about how efficient they were at walking.
These tracks show
they held their limbs
directly under their body,
giving them an upright stance.
Their feet were padded.
And unlike the small pterosaurs,
their long legs
gave them an enormous stride.
Although azhdarchids
are peculiar-looking animals,
they're moving very efficiently.
Azhdarchids combined
this competent terrestrial walking ability
with this massive long stork-like face.
They almost certainly were predators
that walked around reaching down
to grab animals.
We have to remember, though,
the throat size of this thing
is half a meter wide.
That's about the width of my shoulders.
We would be on the menu for these things
if they were alive today.
Pterosaurs would have been
an awe-inspiring sight in the sky.
But these giants were even more impressive
and terrifying on the ground.