Episode list

The Permian-Triassic extinction a quarter billion years ago marks the beginning of the age of dinosaurs. But it was tens of millions of year later that life could get back to normal because the super continent Pangea made most regions of the lands and oceans extremely hot and prone to drastic seasonal weather changes.

Based on the only know fossils of hatzegopteryx paleontologist believe it was histories largest flying animal, larger even that of Quetzalcoatl. It's size was likely due to island gigantism as it inhabited the remote prehistoric island of Hatzeg where flight would have been valuable to locating prey.

The KT extinctions was particularly hard on large apex predators, such as pterosaurs, that faced a sever food shortage relative to their size, compared to smaller herbivorous birds that require less food, such as seeds, that was more available. Birds were also more diverse in terms of species, habitat and food sources in the cretaceous. Based on brain size, birds may have been smarter than pterosaurs too.

When humans arrived in Austrialia about fifty thousand years ago they encountered a content that was largely dessert with the lusher areas being populated by giant reptilian predators and giant mammals and birds that had to be ferocious to survive.

Neanderthals had particularly robust bodies compared to modern humans apparently enabling them to fight face to face with large animals and they have the scars to prove it.