Dinosaurs ruled the planet
for over 150 million years.
They occupied almost every corner of the globe
and came in almost every shape and size imaginable.
Some were truly extraordinary.
We now know that T. rex was a powerful swimmer.
Velociraptors were cunning, feathered hunters,
and that some dinosaurs had the most bizarre behavior.
But new discoveries are being made almost every day
that tell us more about life on this planet 66 million years ago.
This time on Prehistoric Planet,
we reveal new animals
and new insight into their quest to find a partner,
the challenges faced by raising a family
and their titanic battles.
Journey to a time when nature put on its greatest show.
This is Prehistoric Planet 2.
The mouth of a river in southern Europe 66 million years ago.
In the aftermath of a tropical storm, debris is drifting downstream.
And amongst the wreckage, rafts of vegetation ripped from the land.
For a weary pterosaur, this one may be a welcome place to rest...
but it's far from safe.
A huge mosasaur, a deadly underwater hunter,
is looking for an easy meal.
Such as this little dinosaur, Zalmoxes.
Staying here is too risky.
He needs a larger raft, and quickly.
There's little choice but to swim for it.
He is not the first here.
Another castaway.
A female.
Their raft is drifting out to sea.
Sometimes, castaways on rafts like these
are washed up on the shores of the distant islands.
If they're very lucky, this pair could become pioneers.
And may establish a new population, which eventually becomes a new species...
unlike anything seen before.
The longer an island has been isolated,
the more different its animal inhabitants may become.
These small islands in southern Europe
are home to a strange, rather shy hadrosaur.
Feeding amongst these pine saplings, Tethyshadros.
Just a quarter of the size of its giant cousins on the mainland,
it stands no taller than a human being.
With its unique serrated bill, it can forage among the tough vegetation.
Hunters like T. rex have never reached this little island,
so it should be a safe place for a mother to raise her brood.
But not necessarily.
Hatzegopteryx.
Giant predatory pterosaurs.
The best chance of escape is beneath the canopy of the taller trees.
These small calves have been left behind among the saplings.
Mother and young are separated.
Hatzegopteryx are very intelligent pterosaurs.
Now that the element of surprise has gone, they change tactics.
Spreading out across the clearing,
they try to flush out any prey that might still be there.
The youngsters' best hope is to stay completely still...
and not to run.
These two are lucky to be back with their mother.
The island-hopping pterosaurs move on to try their luck elsewhere.
The hadrosaurs can return to feeding.
The island of Madagascar has been separated
from the African mainland for 80 million years.
So long that most of its animals are now very different
from any to be found elsewhere.
This is Simosuchus.
It's not a dinosaur but a miniature relative of crocodiles.
One that lives almost entirely on land
and is strictly vegetarian.
Simosuchus have tough, armored bodies which protect them from attack
by the island's predators.
So they can risk dropping their guard...
sometimes.
Majungasaurus, Madagascar's top hunter.
This particular female is blind in one eye,
so she finds it hard to make a kill, and she's now very hungry.
The Simosuchus have a network of escape routes
that lead them to their underground burrows.
Once inside, they block the entrance with their heavily armored backs.
This little male is unlucky.
But he's not helpless.
Reverse charges, tail swipes and aggressive kicks.
The hunter's snout is too broad to reach very far inside.
But just to be on the safe side, the Simosuchus digs even deeper.
For the Majungasaurus, yet another hunt has ended in failure.
Simosuchus is not the only evolutionary oddity to thrive on Madagascar.
The island is also home to another group of very unusual animals.
Mammals.
This is a female Adalatherium.
She's less than two feet long.
But even so, she's still one of the largest mammals to have yet evolved.
She spends most of her waking hours searching for food.
At the end of this tunnel, there are eggs...
potentially a rich source of protein.
But she doesn't eat this particular clutch.
These are her own eggs.
And this is her burrow.
The eggs are starting to hatch.
The hatchlings' eyes have not yet opened,
but instinctively, they head towards their mother to feed on milk.
She produces it from modified sweat glands on her belly,
and for now, it's all the food they need.
Two months later, and the cubs have more than quadrupled in size.
To produce enough milk for them,
their mother must herself eat a great deal.
So every night, she has to leave the safety of the den in order to feed.
Her eyesight, like that of many burrowing animals,
is not very sensitive.
She relies instead on her acute hearing.
And if she hears something that might be dangerous,
she stays perfectly still.
Trouble avoided.
She returns to searching in the earth for roots and seeds.
The cubs are growing fast and so are their appetites.
The female is now having to search almost nonstop for food.
So her cubs are left unguarded for hours at a time.
Masiakasaurus.
A hunter.
And one particularly well-adapted for catching burrowing prey.
With its long neck and narrow head,
it can investigate any hole that might contain a meal.
But hunters may themselves become the hunted.
Madtsoia, a snake nearly 25 feet long, squeezes its prey to death.
This neighborhood has now become rather dangerous.
As night falls, the mother leads her young out of the burrow for the very first time.
For now, at least, they must stay close together.
In the far south of the planet, on the islands of the Antarctic Peninsula,
winter brings months of freezing temperatures.
Here, too, being part of a family brings benefits.
A thermal camera reveals a huddle of glowing bodies.
Imperobator.
Hunters.
Like most dinosaurs, they are warm-blooded.
But to stay warm, they need a lot of food.
So they must make a kill every few days if they can.
Fresh snow muffles the sound of their footsteps,
enabling them to move undetected through the forest in search of prey.
A Morrosaurus.
A plant eater for whom winter is inevitably a very hard time.
Imperobators specialize in hunting such prey.
The Morrosaurus is faster than its pursuers.
But it's outnumbered by the pack.
The Imperobators' long-feathered tails give them remarkable maneuverability.
The chase has reached the very edge of the forest.
Beyond lies a frozen lake, half a mile wide.
The clear, open space could give the faster Morrosaurus an advantage.
But the frozen surface is treacherous.
With the Imperobator closing in, it isn't much of a choice.
A misplaced step.
A chance for the Morrosaurus to sprint beyond the predators' reach.
But this is an island,
so hunters and hunted will almost certainly meet again.
Some islands are so small
that they have no large land-living residents.
But they may, nonetheless, get visitors.
Hatzegopteryx.
This male has arrived carrying a 40-pound Tethyshadros carcass.
A prize from a recent hunt.
He is 15 feet tall, with a wingspan of over 30 feet.
Hatzegopteryx are Europe's top predators.
But this male has come here to reveal another side to his character.
He has constructed a display to make it clear to any females passing overhead
that he is looking for a mate.
But he might have a very long wait before he gets a response.
At last. A female.
She seems interested,
but a little more persuasion might be necessary.
And he needs to be careful.
One well-aimed peck from her beak
could quickly bring his whole mating season to an end.
His display must demonstrate that he has the good genes
that her young would do well to inherit.
The dead dinosaur suggests that he's a good hunter
and carrying it here has proved that he's a strong flyer.
But if she is impressed, she isn't showing it yet.
Time to produce some new evidence of his eligibility.
Head lifts invite her to come closer.
Now, she gives him a little encouragement.
A synchronized dance creates trust between them.
Another male.
He's much younger, but he could still be a rival.
That's him dealt with.
Disaster. The female has left.
He may have lost his chance.
She's back.
Seeing off a potential rival might even be another point in his favor.
He continues from where he left off.
One last reminder of his strength.
And this is his only contribution to fatherhood.
It's all over in just a few seconds.
But it's the start of the next generation of these giant flying hunters.
Islands like this may only be small,
but like countless others around the world,
they bear witness to crucial moments
in the lives of some of the most unusual creatures
on the Prehistoric Planet.
During the time of the dinosaurs,
the skies were dominated by flying reptiles called pterosaurs.
There were over 250 species...
and some of them were enormous.
One of the most interesting, because they're the most bizarre,
are the azhdarchid pterosaurs.
And to try and describe
what an azhdarchid pterosaur is like is very difficult.
They stand as tall as giraffes.
They've got heads that may have been two meters long,
wingspans of ten meters.
They're some of the most bizarre things who've ever evolved on Earth.
Despite their size, these giants were well-adapted for flight.
So why do we think they hunted on the ground?
The azhdarchid's wing is a skin membrane
supported entirely by a superenlarged fourth finger.
This skin membrane extended from the tip of that giant fourth finger
all the way to the top of the hind leg.
Azhdarchids were supremely adapted for covering great distance,
but they weren't the kind of animals that were twisting and turning
and making agile movements actually in flight.
This would've made it hard for azhdarchids
to catch other flying animals.
They must have had a different way to hunt.
One of the most prevalent ideas about how azhdarchid pterosaurs may have fed
is by using this bizarre mechanism of foraging known as skim feeding.
Today, birds like black skimmers feed in this way.
It's the most ridiculous way of getting your food you can imagine.
It's literally pushing your lower jaw through the water
and crashing into your food.
A skimmer's neck is built to absorb sudden impacts.
But fossils reveal azhdarchids had none of these adaptations.
In fact, they would almost certainly break their necks from just the strain
of trying to push their lower jaws through the water.
An azhdarchid had no option.
It must have landed to find food.
But could it really walk fast enough to hunt?
Scientists needed evidence to persuade them
that they could do anything more than just waddle.
That evidence comes from 66-million-year-old footprints.
The biggest pterosaur track in the world was made
by a walking giant azhdarchid.
That's not only a cool thing to have,
it tells us an awful lot about how efficient they were at walking.
These tracks show
they held their limbs directly under their body,
giving them an upright stance.
Their feet were padded.
And unlike the small pterosaurs,
their long legs gave them an enormous stride.
Although azhdarchids are peculiar-looking animals,
they're moving very efficiently.
Azhdarchids combined this competent terrestrial walking ability
with this massive long stork-like face.
They almost certainly were predators
that walked around reaching down to grab animals.
We have to remember, though,
the throat size of this thing is half a meter wide.
That's about the width of my shoulders.
We would be on the menu for these things if they were alive today.
Pterosaurs would have been an awe-inspiring sight in the sky.
But these giants were even more impressive and terrifying on the ground.