Prehistoric Park

Nigel travels back 65 million years to track down the devastating predator and undoubted king of the dinosaurs: the Tyrannosaurus rex. His search begins in Montana, North America, where many fossilized remains of this formidable creature have been found. Montana would look a strange place to us now; grass would not evolve for another 30 million years and volcanoes dominated the landscape, but you would recognise the trees – the Monkey Puzzle, we still have them today and that pretty much makes them living fossils!

Nigel travels back 10,000 years to the end of the Great Ice Age when Britain was still attached to Europe. As the Earth warmed up it forced the last remaining mammoths back to colder, more remote places like Siberia. Weighing in anywhere between four to six tonnes these herbivores needed plenty of grass and shrubs to sustain their huge bulk and with the Earth warming, forests were overwhelming the grasslands, denying them vital food and threatening their survival. But as Nigel finds out, it wasn’t just the climate that threatened these once highly successful creatures.

Nigel now decides to pay a visit to the China of 125 million years ago: the early Cretaceous period. It was here that experts made a recent and extraordinary discovery: a tiny fossilized dinosaur with feathers. They have called the creature Microraptor, giving the scientific community its strongest evidence to-date that birds are the direct descendants of dinosaurs.