Planet Dinosaur

In north Africa two of the world's biggest predators once battled for supremacy. At thirteen metres and seven tonnes, the carcharodontosaurus was a huge beast, a gigantic lizard-like carnivore with shark-like teeth over six inches long.

This episode reveals the bizarre and extraordinary feathered dinosaurs that have only just been discovered; dinosaurs like Microraptor, Sinornithosaurus and Epidexipteryx; dinosaurs that have revolutionised our understanding of life on earth and blur the boundaries between dinosaurs and 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.