Australia: The Time Traveller's Guide

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[edit] General Information

History Documentary hosted by Richard Smith, published by UKTV in 2012 - English narration

[edit] Cover

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Australia: The Time Traveller's Guide Richard Smith takes us from the birth of the solar system to the modern world, and tells an Australian story that spans 4.6million years. When Europeans first stepped into the island of Australia they saw it as a young country, but nothing could have been farther from the truth. In reality, Australia is a land with the oldest rocks and oldest fossils on Earth, all harbouring secrets from the time when the planet was being formed. Scattered around the sunburnt face of the country, there are clues and enigmas that reveal our planet’s deep past: remains of vast reef systems, bold footprints of bygone creatures, remnants of prehistoric jungles and long, forgotten ancestors. Richard travels around this enormous country, following the ancient clues to unlock the secrets of time. Aided by stunning natural landscapes and state-of-the-art CGI, Australia: The Time Traveller’s Guide brings to life ancient and terrifying animals, as well as Richard’s voyage to the beginning of time itself.

[edit] Early Days

Of all continents on Earth, none preserve the story of the formation of our planet and the evolution of life quite like Australia. Nowhere else can you simply jump in a car and travel back through the entire history of the world. Australia: The Time Traveller's Guide takes you on a rollicking adventure from the birth of the Earth to the emergence of the world we know today. Buckle up for a rocky ride down the Road of Time with series host Dr Richard Smith. Over four one-hour episodes, we meet titanic dinosaurs and giant kangaroos, sea monsters and prehistoric crustaceans, disappearing mountains and exploding asteroids. Epic in scope, intimate in nature, this is the untold story of the land Down Under, the one island continent that has got it all. So join the good Doctor for the ultimate outback road trip: an exploration of the history of the planet as seen through the mind-altering window of the Australian continent. In this first episode, Dr Richard Smith guides us through the early years of the Earth's formation, from the Hadean period onwards.

[edit] First Steps

Great waves of biological invasion sweep us into episode two of Australia: The Time Traveller's Guide. The oceans, replete from the explosion of life that began in the Cambrian, are now spilling their cargoes onto the land. Australia, now part of the super-continent Gondwana is truly a wide, brown land and has had no blush of life on land to blemish its barren surface. As Richard Smith discovers, that all changed in the Silurian. Prepare to meet Planet Earth's forgotten pioneers: the Arthropod armies that invaded the shores. We follow the rise and rise of fish and the emergence of four-legged animals onto the land.. Once again, prehistoric life was busy bankrolling our modern economy and building the basic elements that we know and love as the Australia of today.

[edit] Wild Years

After navigating the perils at the end of the Permian, our journey spends tonight's episode in the Mesozoic just in time for the Age of Dinosaurs, Down Under. Things get off to a shaky start though with the planet left so devastated that the landscape where Sydney now stands was a sandy wasteland. Until recently, nearly everything we've known about the Age of Dinosaurs has come from other continents. But Australia languishes as a Mesozoic backwater no longer. New discoveries are revealing a southern landscape ruled with a reptilian rod: dinosaurs stomped in the west, stampeded in the east and shivered in the south. Some were among the largest dinosaurs to have walked the planet

[edit] Big Island

Dr Richard Smith embarks on the final stage of his journey through the geological history of Australia, from the formation of its landscape to the development of its wildlife in today's desert heart we plunge into an ancient inland sea, full of monsters. But reptiles didn't have the world all to themselves. Mammals like the enigmatic platypus lived alongside them, ready for their moment in the sun. We know that land as the supercontinent Gondwana, and it was during the greening of Gondwana that the eastern third of the continent was put in place, complete with Australia's vast coal reserves