The Science of Walking with Beasts

  1. Episode
  2. Description
Episode 1

Triumph of the Beast

Explains just how mammals replaced the dinosaurs as the largest, fastest and fiercest creatures in the world. 65 million years ago a giant meteorite struck the earth, causing the mass extinction of 70 percent of all land animals. Although this cataclysmic event sounded the death knell for the 120-million-year reign of the dinosaurs, a few mammals survived.

As the world became a strangely unpredictable place the mammals had only two choices – adapt or die. As well as being warm-blooded, mammals have large brains, which makes it easier for them to learn how to adapt as the world changes around them.

They also produce milk, which means their young have ahead start over their predecessors.

Mammals have another secret weapon too – teeth – giving them flexibility and the ability to live in a variety of habitats. Bite marks found on fossils of creatures like the giant, pig-like Entelodont tell the story.

Episode 2

The Beast within Us

Provides a fascinating insight into the science that has helped man understand that enduring conundrum – how can humans, with their intelligence, political sophistication, and finesse, have anything in common with beasts that live in trees? The truth, initially, in the days of Darwin unpalatable, has now become universally accepted – man does indeed have an ancestral connection with the ape.

Incredible fossil finds of early primates reveal that they shared common characteristics with man – grasping hands, forward-facing eyes, fingernails instead of claws and large brains relative to body size. Although early primates, such as the Godinotia that lived 49 million years ago, swung from branch to branch, a fossil found in Uganda revealed that an ape existed 20 million years ago that could walk upright. Footprints preserved in volcanic ash in Tanzania, made three and a half million years ago, point to a different type of creature that walked more like a human than an ape.

What could have made these prints? The Australopithecus, walking on two legs and living in social groups, paved the way for the development of the human race.

Beastly bones, fossils and clever animatronics provide the evidence.