Planet Dinosaur

The opening programme travels to prehistoric North Africa, where the carcharodontosaurus, a lizard-like carnivore with shark-like teeth more than six inches long, and the spinosaurus - at four metres, one of the biggest killers to walk the planet - once battled for supremacy.

The second episode of the documentary series takes a look at bizarre and extraordinary feathered dinosaurs, many of which have only just been discovered. These feathered beasts are revolutionising our understanding of life on Earth as they blur the boundaries between what we know of dinosaurs and birds. China sits at the heart of the feathered dinosaur discoveries and is the home of one of the most unusual discoveries on Earth: the epidexipteryx. Only the size of a pigeon, this predator was the most bird-like of any dinosaur and is the first known case of ornamental feathers. But feathers were not just confined to the small. From caudipteryx to sinosauropteryx and the 8-metre-long gigantoraptor, feathers may have been used for flight, for insulation or even to intimate and attract. These dinosaurs not only hint at how animals might have developed flight, but also suggest that dinosaurs may still live among us today, as birds.

This programme explores the last generation of killer dinosaurs. Carnivores that took killing to the next level. At the end of the Cretaceous period these hunter killers had spread throughout the globe. In the southern continents it was the powerful and muscular abelisaurs, like Majungasaurus, that reigned supreme. Whereas in the north it was the famous tyrannosaurs, like Daspletosaurus, that dominated.

This episode journeys back 150 million years to the Jurassic period. This was a time when the first giant killers stalked the earth predators like the fabled Allosaurus. But these giants weren’t confined to the land, recent discoveries have revealed an astonishing new hunter in the oceans, a predator that dwarfs almost all others; Predator X. From the oceans to the land these new giant killers posed the greatest of threats with the smallest advantage tipping the balance between life and death. Predator and prey were locked in a perpetual battle for survival.

This programme focuses on the new giants, the heavyweights of the dinosaur world. It’s only in recent years that we’ve unearthed the biggest dinosaurs that ever lived. One monster eclipsed all others, more than seven times as heavy as Diplodocus this was the immense Argentinosaurus – a single backbone was bigger than a human. For years these giants were considered immune to attack from any predator – until the discovery of– Mapusaurus – a new giant killer whose fate appeared to be inextricably linked to Argentinosaurus.

This final episode explores the dinosaurs' extraordinary ability to survive. From the bizarre Magyarsaurus, which showed an amazing adaptation to island life, to the weird Nothronychus, a carnivore that gave up meat eating. This astonishing capacity to evolve into ever more diverse and bizarre forms meant that dinosaurs, not only, spread throughout the world, but also, dominated life upon it for more than 160 million years. It was only an unprecedented extraterrestrial event that finally saw the end of planet dinosaur.