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Dinosaurs: The Final Day With David Attenborough review – a thrilling slice of time-travelling detective work
The awe-inspiring broadcaster vividly brings dinosaurs’ last terrifying minutes to life in this slick, gripping and elegiac feature-length documentary
The last day of the dinosaurs probably began as a morning like any other. On a sandbank bounded by a river and warm wet forests in what’s now the dusty North Dakota prairies, triceratops and tyrannosaurs laid eggs, roamed, did their late Cretaceous thing. Thescelosaurs and turtles swam in the river. Pterosaurs flew overhead and furry mammalian creatures burrowed underground. On one of the most important days in Planet Earth’s history, as only David Attenborough can so portentously pronounce it, life went on in abundance. Until an asteroid bigger than Mount Everest hit what is now Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula with an explosion whose force was greater than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs. In less than two hours, the world as we never knew it was for ever changed.
We don’t know exactly when the asteroid hit. But within 40 minutes, the consequences 2,000 miles away at Tanis – the name given to the Dakotan sandbank by the palaeontologists who have been digging there for a decade – were profound. Dinosaurs: The Final Day With David Attenborough (BBC One) recreates those last terrifying minutes as wildfires, earthquakes, tsunamis and seismic waves ravaged the globe and all life at Tanis was swiftly entombed in sediment. For context, this was 60m years before we pitched (or rather stood) up. And we’re seeing in real time how that’s panning out.
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