Oxfordshire 149,000,000 B.C. – Under these azure waters ... here dinosaurs do not rule; instead, giant marine reptiles have evolved perfectly adapted to life in these beautiful waters. All of them are air breathers. Walking With Dinosaurs s1e3: Cruel Sea
As perfectly evolved killing machines sharks were patrolling the oceans long before marine reptiles appeared. ibid.
In life he was the most magnificent beast ever to take to the wing; he ruled the skies supreme flying far and wide over the lands of the dinosaurs. This is the story of the last journey this giant ever made. Walking with Dinosaurs s1e4: Giant of the Skies
Brazil 127,000,000 B.C. ... Pterosaurs have filled the skies for 100,000,000 years, and many species are now huge. ibid.
There is one species that dwarfs them all: he is Ornithocheirus, twelve metres from wing tip to wing tip. ibid.
The climate in the time of the dinosaurs is warm and tropical. There are only two seasons – dry and wet. ibid.
Dawn over a silent forest a few hundred miles from the South Pole ... Here there are polar dinosaurs. Walking with Dinosaurs s1e5: Spirits of the Ice Forest
Antarctica 106,000,000 B.C. ... A fully grown Polar-Allosaur needs about one hundred kilos of meat a week. (Dinosaurs & Antarctic) ibid.
Montana 65,500,000 B.C. It is the end of the Cretaceous period and the continents are taking on their modern forms. Walking with Dinosaurs s1e6: Death of a Dynasty
Massive eruptions that have lasted for centuries have laid waste to landscapes and filled the atmosphere with poisonous gases and debris. ibid.
Life on Earth is choking to death. ibid.
Tyrannosaurus – a five-ton thirteen-metre carnivore specifically evolved to kill other giant dinosaurs. ibid.
Among these new plants the birds are flourishing. ibid.
Showers of shooting stars herald the approach of a giant comet on a collision course with Earth. ibid.
Now they are facing a combination of events that will spell their doom. ibid.
65% of life died out. ibid.
For more than a century Americans have had a love affair with dinosaurs. Extinct for millions of years, they were barely known until giant fossil bones were discovered in the mid-nineteenth century. Two American scientists – Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh led the way to many of these discoveries. Dinosaur Wars, PBS 2011
Cope and Marsh locked horns for decades in one of the most bitter scientific rivalries in American history. ibid.
Out of all the creatures in the ocean at least seven out of ten species go extinct. Peter Ward, University of Washington
If we measured success by longevity, then dinosaurs must rank as the number one success story in the history of land life. Robert T Bakker, The Dinosaur Heresies
Great Britain 1980: many viewers were stunned to see this incredible image appear on their television sets: a news-like documentary had people afraid to leave their homes because of an actual dinosaur discovered in the middle of London. The World’s Greatest Hoaxes Revealed
This fossil – this clearly crossed between a bird and a dinosaur – was what everybody had been looking for, and here it was. Peter Larson palaeontologist, Horizon: The Dinosaur that Fooled the World, BBC 2002
What would have happened? Would it have been an evolutionary race? Maybe there would have been a winner. Or maybe ultimately, unbelievably, madly, it could have been perhaps even a cooperation. Professor Simon Conway Morris, evolutionary palaeo-biologist
More than a hundred and fifty different species of dinosaur have been found in the rocks of China alone, and over a thousand worldwide. David Attenborough’s Rise of Animals: Triumph of the Vertebrates, BBC 2013
China: the intriguing link between dinosaurs and birds. ibid.
With the bigger dinosaurs gone, the world was up for grabs. ibid.
A meteor impact that sent shockwaves around the world ... 65 million years ago they disappeared [dinosaurs] from the fossil record. David Attenborough’s Rise of Animals: Triumph of the Vertebrates: Dawn of the Mammals
Birds today are the masters of the skies. But they were not the first creatures to fly. And they are certainly not the biggest. David Attenborough: Flying Monsters, Sky 2011
They were reptiles: pterosaurs; they evolved into a huge variety of species, some the size of aeroplanes. ibid.
Why did these magnificent beasts take to the air in the first place? ibid.
Around 250 million years ago: the planet then was a very different place. ibid.
Draco ... jumps but it does more than just leap; it extends the width of its body by opening flaps of skin along its flanks, and they enable it to glide. ibid.
This is the Jurassic Coast: its rocks are full of fossils of prehistoric creatures. ibid.
Her name was Mary Anning ... She had an almost unbelievable talent for unearthing fossils .. the Princess of Palaeontology. ibid.
The big head and pointed teeth of Darwinopterus makes it clear that this was a predator so it must have been very agile in the air. ibid.
This fossil is 140 million years old: it has the enlarged head of an advanced pterosaur but its tail is different – it has become much shorter. And this short-tailed species wasn’t alone. It was clearly a very successful modification. ibid.
This ability to walk had a profound effect on pterosaur evolution. ibid.
There were several kinds of feathered reptile living about this time. ibid.
The largest creature ever to fly lived 70 million years ago during the Cretaceous period. It stood twenty feet high, so tall it could look a giraffe in the eye: Quetzalcoatlus. ibid.
Then suddenly they vanished. A meteor that crashed into Earth sixty-five million years ago is often blamed for the extinction of the dinosaurs and the pterosaurs, but the truth is that their fate was already sealed. ibid.
It was the birds who rose from the ashes of that meteor. ibid.
Birds today have evolved into thousands of species. ibid.
The dynasty of the pterosaurs lasted over a hundred and fifty million years. ibid.
66 million years ago planet Earth was very different from today … The rulers of the land were giant reptiles: dinosaurs. Dinosaurs: The Final Day with David Attenborough, BBC 2022
What happened to them all? 66 million years ago an asteroid hit the Earth, and scientists think it was this collision that wiped out the dinosaurs. ibid.
A remarkable dig site … in the American mid-west … rich in prehistoric remains … This place may hold evidence of one of the most dramatic events … ibid.
Two hundred and fifty million years ago, before the time of the dinosaurs … an early relative of mammals … the Great Dying – the Permean Extinction. The most catastrophic extinction event in the history of the planet. Reign of the Dinosaurs I: Evolution’s Winners, Discovery Channel 2012
Dinosaurs were more like birds than giant lizards. ibid.
Specimen: Allosaurus Fragilis Jawbone – Collection: Smithsonian Institution – Size 12 inches. Reign of the Dinosaurs II: The Watering Hole
Much of what we knew about dinosaurs is wrong … Welcome to the dinosaur revolution. Reign of the Dinosaurs III: Survival Tactics
T-Rexs may have been good parents – Their children may have had feathers; and some dinosaurs even survived the asteroid apocalypse. Reign of the Dinosaurs IV
‘You’re not allowed to call them dinosaurs any more,’ said Yo-less. ‘It’s speciesist. You have to call them pre-petroleum persons.’ Terry Pratchett, Johnny and the Bomb
Dinosaurs are extinct today because they lacked opposable thumbs and the brainpower to build a space program. Neil deGrasse Tyson, The Sky is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist