Prehistoric Park

Nigel travels back 10,000 years to the end of the Great Ice Age when Britain was still attached to Europe. As the Earth warmed up it forced the last remaining mammoths back to colder, more remote places like Siberia. Weighing in anywhere between four to six tonnes these herbivores needed plenty of grass and shrubs to sustain their huge bulk and with the Earth warming, forests were overwhelming the grasslands, denying them vital food and threatening their survival. But as Nigel finds out, it wasn’t just the climate that threatened these once highly successful creatures.

Today we have five species of big cat, in the past there have been 30 and Nigel decides to rescue the most famous extinct prehistoric feline of all: the Sabre Tooth. Often referred to as the Sabre Tooth Tiger, this is incorrect as the creature was not a tiger but a big cat. Three million years ago the Smilodon, or Sabre Tooth, was top predator in North America and, when the landmasses of North and South came together, it entered the territory of South America’s top carnivore, the Phorusrhacid or Terror Bird: a three-metre tall flightless flesh eater!

In his most dangerous mission to date, Nigel has decided to travel back to prehistoric Texas, 75 million years ago, to find and bring back a colossal 50-foot long Cretaceous crocodile: Deinosuchus. There were more species of dinosaur alive at this point in prehistoric North America than at any other time, so Nigels quarry wont be the only predator stalking the shoreline...