David Attenborough continues his search for the origins of flying animals, as he charts the rise of new, larger creatures – extinct reptiles that flew on wings of skin, dinosaurs that sprouted feathers to become the ancestors of birds, and gliding mammals that emerged from a life in the trees to dominate the night as bats. His journey spans the globe – from the rainforests of Borneo to see bizarre gliding animals, to China and its new discoveries of dinosaur fossils. Stunning CGI brings to life creatures that disappeared over 200 million years ago, and new filming techniques bring us closer than ever to the secrets of flight itself.
David Attenborough concludes his epic history of the evolution of flight with an exploration of the highly advanced fliers that dominate our skies today – the extraordinarily diverse skills of the birds, and the sonar-guided precision of the bats. He encounters some of our planet’s most remarkable fliers – from peregrine falcons dive-bombing starlings over Rome, to hummingbirds hovering in the cloud forests of Ecuador. In a spectacular finale, he visits Gomantong cave in Borneo to witness the mass exodus of a million bats.
Moving on to the Late Eocene period 36 million years ago and mammals have prospered and are now the largest creatures on land and sea. This is an era of animals like andrewsarchus, the biggest mammal carnivore ever to walk on land, and the brontotheres, small-brained herbivores. It is in the sea, however, that the most monstrous mammals of all can be found. We follow the fate of a female basilosaurus, a huge serpent-like early whale, but nothing like the gentle filter feeding whales of the 21st century. Four times the length of the great white shark, with jaws to match, she is every inch a killer.
25 million years ago the biggest land mammals of all time, the indricotheres, stalked the Earth. Up to seven metres tall and weighing 15 tonnes, adults were too big to be eaten by any predator of the time. Only in the first few years of its life was indricotheres vulnerable. The programme follows the fate of a calf from his traumatic birth to see whether it can survive droughts, killer hogs and hyaenodon - a predator the size of a rhino with jaws that could crush a rock.
Moving on to Ethiopia 3.2 million years ago, we witness the beginnings of mankind via a group of australopithecus - a type of ape which, like us, walks upright on two legs. But unlike us, these early members of the human family weren't predators, they were prey. Things get worse for the group as they are hunted by a sabre-tooth cat called dinofelis and fall victim to other dangers such as malaria, rival australopithecus and a rampaging 14-tonne deinotherium.
