1ST EPISODE
"Welcome in our cave for a new journey into science!": these are the first Piero Angela's words at the start of the program, after having gone down from the upper studio with an elevator. The main host explains that dinosaurs were first discovered about 200 years ago, and that this series "will be like a police investigation", but also "a tentative to really rebuild the images of that disappeared world". The silouhette of the robotic Brontosaurus appears in one monitor of the "technological cave".
The time-journey then begins. The main host goes to the Time Machine, envoys his "twin" in the Triassic and sees him flying on a hot-air balloon over an arid volcanic landscape. Piero from the studio says "He's an envoy we know well: he's the same we've encountered in the journey in the Human Body" (referencing to the earlier series The Wonderful Machine, "La Macchina Meravigliosa" in the original Italian speech). The time-traveler and the main host explain about the supercontinent Pangaea and its successive fragmentation to form the modern continents.
The traveler flies toward a "great tropical-like forest" to escape the smokes from the volcanoes; the forest is full of ferns, cycads, horsetails, araucarias (which produce "a good aroma of resin"), and unidentified flying insects, but not flowers because they have yet to appear. Before arriving in the oasis the traveler had seen five running bipedal dinosaurs from his balloon and said they should be Coelophysis (it is). When in the forest, he's seen rowing on a log used as a raft in a marsh, and mets two elephant-sized Plateosaurus feeding on trees and an ancient pterosaur flying above them. The voyager says there are also crocodile-relatives hidden in the swamp.
After these meeting with the Triassic reptiles, the main host explains how dinosaurs could be compared with modern land-mammals and land-birds by showing some concrete examples (f.e. sauropods recalling elephants and triceratopses reminding rhinoceroses). Before, he — with the aid of "the envoy in the present", his son Alberto Angela "the naturalist" — had explained that dinosaurs and modern reptiles were very different to each other, and are distinguishable thanks to the posture of their limbs. After, he had also shown some insects trapped in amber and talked about the controversial theory of cloning dinosaurs from DNA extracted from blood-sucking insects (we're in Jurassic Park times, Autumn 1993).
In the half of the episode, Piero Angela makes his alter-ego going to the Late Jurassic. Here the travelling Angela has a spectacularly-close approach with a herd of gigantic Brontosaurs, and then is obligated to flee from a menacing Allosaurus. The main host, basing upon the latter's roar, tells to us that the ability to vocalize among dinosaurs is only a guess, as well as most things known about these prehistoric animals. It's pointed out that modern reptiles usually don't emit sounds apart of hisses, except for the social crocodilians that "can emit long-traveling powerful bellows or make noises by snapping their jaws", but that dinosaurs probably could emit sounds like their relatives the birds.
Several fossil pieces of dinosaurs are then shown: first a Protoceratops skull found in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia by Alberto Angela (who was a member of an expedition led by Italian experts of the Ligabue center of Venice), then the famous giant arms of Deinocheirus and the huge claw of Therizinosaurus in the studio, and the immense limb of what was at the time believed the biggest dinosaur: the sauropod "Ultrasaurus". The main host and Alberto explain that sauropod bones show "rings" like those of the trees which show dinosaurs probably never stopped to grow in their life. Then, the main host tell us that there are many hypotheses to explain the gigantism of the dinosaurs: self-defence, heat-preservation, and climatic reasons. A primitive 3D CGI image is shown during the explanation, with some sauropods, a carnosaur, some triceratopses, some stegosaurs, and flying pterosaurs.
Again, Piero goes to the time-machine and see his twin-explorer 140 mya with two Stegosaurus, one of them dormant. After a brief mention of the gastrolithes (the "stones in the stomach") the main argument becomes sauropod footprints found in Texas; shown by Alberto Angela, they demonstrate that (contrary to the traditional vision) giant dinosaurs didn't need to stay constantly in water to support their bulk.
At the end of the episode, the main Angela makes his twin traveling toward the Late Cretaceous, 70 mya. Here the time-voyager has close approaches with three kinds of hadrosaurs (large bipedal herbivorous dinosaurs with different-looking heads), sees the first ever-appeared flowers in the forest, and then is obligated to hidden himself under a rock to not be spotted by a huge Tyrannosaurus rex appeared abruptly out from the forest. After the "rex" goes away having failed to catch its preys, the main host concludes saying in the next episode we'll se dinosaurs "in their daily life, and also in their predations".
2ND EPISODE
"We'll continue our journey in Prehistory at the time it was dominated by the great reptiles", says Piero Angela from the studio. He tell us that the main argument of this episode is predation, because even at dinosaur times "there were impalas and lions" — that is there were preys and predators.
He goes immediately to the time-machine and meets the "envoy in the past" in the Cretaceous, 70 mya. The latter appears at evening in an arid landscape with brand new dinosaurs not seen in the previous episode: first a herd of large Pachycephalosaurus, two of them headbutt each other, then a group of giant hadrosaurs Edmontosaurus, and finally a solitary small Deinonychus observing them from a safe distance. Then the main host talks about the famous Velociraptor-Protoceratops fossil battle, and contacts his son Alberto (the "envoy in the present") who this time is near the famous Hell-Creek formation in Montana to show a skull of a tyrannosaur rex and a skull of an edmontosaurine hadrosaur together, pointing out the differences between the two.
A 14 m long and almost 8 m tall specimen of the "T. rex" is met just after in Prehistory, appearing in a magnificent redwood forest. The traveler asists to a dramatic pursue in which a young but already well-armed Triceratops flees from the tyrannosaur, who apparently had missed its target at first. But then, the envoy sees with surprise that the giant carnivore has managed somehow to capture the herbivore. After comparisons in the studio with modern large predatory reptiles like the crocodiles and the Komodo Dragon filmed from Real Life, a T. rex skeleton is shown and described in one image on screen. The main host explains that its forelimbs "almost didn't exist, they look almost atrophied stubs" but that its head, stomach, and legs were large and massive, concluding with this sentence: "Someone has said the tyrannosaur is basically a mouth walking on two legs".
After, he mets again the time-voyager who's again in the middle of a river on its raft-like log, explaining how many specimens of tyrannosaurs and triceratopses probably roamed the environments at the time, and wondering if he could met "a whole herd" of the latter. The main host takes the occasion to describe the typically horned/frilled skull of Triceratops in the studio (explaining its possible functions) and of other relatives on screen: the multi-spiked Styracosaurus and the huge Torosaurus, "the biggest skull of every land animal".
The traveler asks the main host: he's at last found a small group of Triceratops marching together like soldiers, maybe the herd of the unfortunate youngster of the previous scene. For the first time in the series the hosts talk about a new argument, dinosaur eggs. The envoy finds a nest of Triceratops on a hill with recently-deposed eggs, but is obligated to leave it after a 8 tons mother Triceratops arrives. The main Angela then starts to talk about what is known about dinosaur eggs and nidification in general, also by connecting with Alberto who this time is in Mongolia where some possible sauropod eggs have been recently dug out, as well as some young dinosaurs (ankylosaurians Pinacosaurus).
A quote made by Sherlock Holmes introduces another interesting argument: the dinosaurs footprints, "that, unlike bones, are images of life" because they show how dinosaurs acted actually when alive. The traveling Angela shows a strange old-fashioned video-recorder when is flying on his balloon and shows a fast tracking shot of all the dinosaurs already encountered in the two episodes to compare their gait and fastness, plus some new dinosaurs filmed outscreen (Struthiomimus, Brachiosaurus, and a Triceratops stampede).The following footprint discussion is also one of those moments in which non-moving Computer Graphic Images of dinosaurs are shown, a generic sauropod and a generic carnivore. Alberto Angela shows from the USA the track of "the fastest dinosaur ever found", an unidentified small bipedal carnivore which runned at 40 km per hour, faster than every human but "still slower than a horse".
Finally, after having seen the dramatic scene of the Dromaeosaurid's night hunt, the main host widely explain the difficult-to-resolve question of the cold/warm blooded dinosaurs (with the aid of another non-motion CGI image) already mentioned in the 1st episode. He concludes that dinosaurs were probably a middle-way between the two extremes: some like the sauropods or stegosaurs were more heterothermic (but still able to retain heat in their body by different means), while other were probably already warm-blooded like mammals and birds were at the time.
The last scene of the episode is a Tyrannosaurus rex eating its prey during a sunrise. After that a large pterosaur flies near the human, announcing indirectly the argument of the following episode: "the reptiles that in the past roamed the seas but principally the skies: the extraordinary pterosaurs, some of which had a 15 m wingspan, like a plane".
3RD EPISODE
This time Piero Angela introduces us to the "traveling companions of the dinosaurs": pterosaurs and the great sea reptiles. The first ones shown are the smallish long-tailed flying reptiles Rhamphorhynchus, which soar around the traveler's balloon in the Jurassic. The time-voyager explains that pterosaurs are excellent flyers (though not very fast) also thanks to their hollow bones similar to birds.
After a brief meeting with the sauropod Mamenchisaurus, the hosts Piero and Alberto explain to us how pterosaurs probably flied in Real Life: their style was more similar to soaring than to active flight thanks to the typical structure of their wings. Alberto also show to us two large skulls of pterosaurs (Tropeognathus) found in Brazil, in Chapada do Araripe.
Then, the human voyager see a great lagoon full of pterosaurs of the period, unsuccessfully searching for pterosaur nests on a cliff. He identifies a flying reptile different than Rhamphorhynchus, the tail-less Pterodactylus, and see two of the former fishing. The Angela in the studio explains there were many kinds of flying reptiles in reality, some immense and some only a bit bigger than a sparrow, and shows some drawings of very different pterosaur heads, all with "hair" (pterosaurian "hair" was already known by science since the seventies, two decades before the program).
By surprise, the traveler abruptly interrupts the main host: before starting his trip to the Cretaceous (the time of the giant pterosaurs) he has faced "some very strange dinosaurs" depredating other dinosaurs' eggs: they reveal to be Oviraptors, robbing Protoceratops eggs. After this digression, the main host talks about the pterosaurs' origins and relationships with dinosaurs and the other archosaurian reptiles with a schematic evolutionary tree note , and then talks about the advantages of flying among animals in general, by comparing pterosaurs with modern flying animals with a nature video showing birds, insects, bats, and also the "flying" fishes.
When in the Cretaceous the traveler appears clothed like an aviator, takes a strange old-style hang-glider, and launches himself in the air from a high cliff, meeting first the peaceful Pteranodon and then the more dangerous Quetzalcoatlus — barely escaping the latter. The pteranodont is compared with a pelican for its long beak with a "sack" under it and for its soaring flight; the quetzalcoatlus is putatively compared with a large carrion-eating condor (the dominant theory of the time), but as its neck could have been too rigid this is said to be only a supposition, and that its real lifestyle is actually a mystery.
Before "going together under the oceans and seas to meet the great marine reptiles" the main Piero Angela talks about the origin of true birds, showing illustrations of the Cretaceous toothed proto-birds Ichthyornis and Hesperornis and explaining the two alternative opinions of the time: the older one — birds descend not from dinosaurs but from ancient common ancestors, with an illustration of the enigmatic "Protoavis"; and the modern one — birds descend directly from (non-avian) dinosaurs. A model of Archaeopteryx is then shown and described by "the naturalist" Alberto when he's in the city of Eichstatt in Germany, and an animation about how the archaeopteryx could have started to fly is shown, comparing it with modern gliding animals like the "flying" squirrel and the "flying" snake.
"Who just inhabited the seas at that time?": the main host asks rethorically this in the last part of the episode. He answers that there were large reptiles totally adapted to an underwater lifestyle, a sort of "aquatic dinosaurs" but actually very distantly related with them. In the Cretaceous seas, 100 mya, the traveler goes underwater with a small Captain Nemo-like submarine; after describing the craft to the host in the studio, he encounters first a big medusa (as an example of archaic form of life), and then the ichthyosaurs, dolphin-like reptiles so-adapted to an underwater life that give birth to live offsprings underwater and are unable to go ashore like their ancestors did. Soon after, a giant Kronosaurus collides against the seacraft, but fortunately without damage for the submarine and his pilot.
Finally, after having traveled 20 million years after, the adventurer goes to see the "giant crocodile" Deinosuchus tempting to hunt some herbivorous dinosaurs from a river...unsuccessfully, because all hadrosaurs escape it (very similar to what it seen at the end of the first episode with the tyrannosaur failing to catch the same dinosaurs). Before that, Alberto Angela was shown in a museum in South Dakota showing the skeletons of a mosasaurid and an elasmosaurid. The main host ends the program announcing the extinction argument of the next episode.
4TH EPISODE
"The argument this time is particularly interesting and intriguing": the main host says it's the Extinction of Dinosaurs, this "little great mystery of the life's story".
To get in depth with it, we fly with the fancy (and the Time Machine) at the End of the Dinosaur Era, 65 mya. Here we see the Angela-traveler "for the last time" on his balloon, along with some oviraptors and pteranodonts that are unaware about what is going to happen to them. Then, Alberto and Piero list some outdated/improbable theories like the famous one of the "egg-eating mammals", with Alberto showing an alligator nest in a marsh.
Then, a brief digression is made to explain the also-outdated Supernova theory, and the traveller sees one shining in one night of the Cretaceous. But then, the Asteroid hyp totally takes the program: all the rest of the episode is dedicated to it. First, the main host shows an old interview made by himself to famous nobel-prized L. Alvarez in 1979; then, talks about the Solar System and about the Barringer Crater in Arizona (where Alberto is this time), who was provoked by a sky body "with a power of 4 Hiroshima bombs" only few thousands years B.C.
After having shown some armored quadrupedal herbivorous Ankylosaurus wandering slowly along in the Cretaceous, the program shows up (perhaps for the first time in a TV documentary) the Chixculub Crater discovery, made just in those years thanks to petroleum-related researches and to observations from space-satellites of the NASA. The envoy Alberto appears for the last time with a geologist colleague to analize some geological strata in Mexico, finally declairing that "only the hit of an asteroid might have caused them: it's an unequivocal signature".
The second part of the episode follows the slow approaching of the 10 km-wide asteroid from the Space. The two "twin hosts" talk about which dinosaurs and non-dinosaur reptiles among those met in the voyage are still alive at the time, and which were already gone. Then, the host in the studio cites some examples of animal groups already extinct long before the dinosaurs: armored fish, trilobites, pelycosaurs like Dimetrodon, thecodonts, and therapsids (the host always uses the classic Linnean terminology, because cladistic at the time was just starting to emerge in official science).
After having seen "for the last time" the Mesozoic sealife with the traveler's submarine (who encounters an Elasmosaurus here), the main host talks about The Tunguska Event and, later, about the terrifying scenario of the "Nuclear Winter" if a total nuclear conflict would have happened in the future — the docu is from 1993, just after the Cold War ended.
The scene of the Impact happens at night, and the Asteroid falls beyond the horizon like in Walking with Dinosaurs. What is seen in the following scene is easy to imagine: a dark freezing world full of dying plants and dinosaurs. The main host then guesses if some (non-bird) dinosaurs could have survived the catastrophe for some time after the impact, and if climatic changes, including putative glaciations, could have done their part to complete the extinction "in a longer period".
But why did the dinosaurs and the other giant reptiles go extinct, and not the smaller reptiles, the amphibians, or even the birds? The main host says it's a mystery, but then the mammals' success after the mass-extinction is celebrated with a video taken from pieces of nature documentaries showing a series of wild mammals (elephants, whales, cheetahs, gazelles, zebras, gorillas, hyraxes, and buffaloes), "that exist thanks to that ancient cataclysm", as well as us humans. Piero Angela concludes the program, other than with the final greetings, also with a warning: "We're starting to understand the past, and also how fragile the ecosystems are, in the past and still today: and yet we unscrupolously continue to destroy them, and maybe even to provoke changes in the climate".
