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00:00Life began here in Britain more than a billion years ago and when dinosaurs and
00:12other strange creatures roamed our land they left fascinating clues behind.
00:19The fossil detectives are on the trail of that evidence throughout the British Isles.
00:24We'll bring dinosaurs back to life, follow in the fossil footprints of our ancestors
00:32and reveal why fossils were once thought to be food for the dead. Our adventures here in the
00:39west and northwest of Britain give us a tantalizing glimpse of how fossils link us back to our own
00:46past. And the evidence is all around us in the rocks, in the landscape, in the sea and in the
00:53fossils buried deep inside. We're here to find and analyse that evidence, to unlock the secrets
01:00of the past and discover lost worlds. So get ready for some time travel with the fossil detectives.
01:23Britain has gone through so many transformations through time.
01:40200 million years ago in the Triassic, Wales was sat right in the middle of a huge landmass
01:48close to the equator, roughly where the Sahara is today.
01:52This giant supercontinent was a harsh desert environment.
02:00Seasonal rainfall elsewhere caused flash flooding in the region from time to time
02:06as riverbeds swelled and overflowed.
02:09At the first signs of water, any living creature would congregate around the rivers and the pools
02:15to quench their thirst. But it was never long before the blistering sun returned
02:20and baked their footprints hard into the ground. Today fossilised footprints and trackways,
02:27all trace fossils, can reveal astonishingly detailed intelligence about prehistoric life.
02:38Phil Manning is one of our regular fossil detectives. A professional dinosaur hunter,
02:49he specialises in the forensic science of dinosaurs and has been doing some pioneering
02:55research into fossilised footprints. This is Bendrick Rock in Wales.
03:02Can anyone come down and just have a look at them? Well that's what makes localities like
03:06this and so many across the United Kingdom so accessible. You can get down to the shore
03:11and look at quite wonderful fossils just like this. Here you can clearly see the three toes
03:18of a small dinosaur. And we know it was walking on its two legs, it was bipedal and we can follow
03:23its trackways and know that its legs are swung right underneath its body. So this makes it the
03:28earliest dinosaur tracks in the whole of the British Isles. These are the oldest dinosaur tracks.
03:33So this is actually a dinosaur, evidence that a dinosaur once walked across here.
03:37Absolutely and in the Triassic, the beginning of the age of the dinosaurs.
03:45Dinosaur bones and the tracks prehistoric creatures left behind
03:50can offer us remarkable insights into the past. Fossilised remains of ancient monsters
03:57can now be scientifically analysed together with fossilised footprints and trackways
04:02to find out brand new information about dinosaurs. Behind the scenes we can see how
04:10this new research into evolutionary robotics gives us exciting clues about the way they lived their
04:17lives. So earlier on today when we're looking at tracks, well these are bones and we can actually
04:24use both of them to help interpret dinosaurs. Well I have to say I think I recognise this one Phil.
04:30Anything that had a jaw this big, surely this is part of Tyrannosaurus Rex? Absolutely right.
04:36And remind us what T-Rex would have been like when it was alive?
04:40A T-Rex has got this enormous skull but one of the most distinct features are these banana-sized
04:46teeth. Many of them within the jaws, quite narrow jaws broadening out into quite a wide at the back
04:52of the skull, eyes the size of saucers, leading onto this powerful neck to hold this huge skull
04:59at the end. But moving down the neck we go into an enormous barrel-shaped body, a powerful chest,
05:04but these puny little forearms with often seen as just having two fingers but we now know
05:10it actually had a very tiny third finger. Then we go down towards the back side of the animal
05:15we have these powerful hind limbs which would have been the main engine for this animal to push
05:20itself through its environment and an enormous balancing tail because you've got a big chest you
05:23need a big tail to balance that out. T-Rex is a very distinctive animal. So this is one of its
05:30banana-sized teeth, it's absolutely fantastic. And I think the fact I love about this tooth is it's
05:36roughly the same size as the brain of T-Rex so its brain is the size of its largest tooth.
05:41The ideal thing is to have a virtual dinosaur. There's a team of five or more people back at
05:46Manchester who've been working on this for years now and we're learning an awful lot and we started
05:50off with a very basic model. Now you mustn't laugh but this is pointy-saurus. I can see why.
05:56Well pointy-saurus is a really useful starting point because it allows us to have sort of the
06:01body and the basic limb segments we can add our muscle groups and get the muscles firing off in
06:05the right pattern and after so many cycles the computer learns how to get from A to B in the
06:11fastest possible way. So how fast then could something like T-Rex have moved? For that we
06:17need a race. Now before you have your race though you've got to test your model and here you can see
06:22on the bottom left hand corner we have a emu, then we've got an ostrich and a human. Now we can
06:28judge how fast these living animals can achieve in terms of top running speeds so we can then test
06:33our model to see if we come up with a reasonable speed. So would T-Rex would have been the very big
06:37one. What about the dinosaur that made the footprints that we saw earlier today? How big
06:42would that one have been? That's roughly the size of the just one up from the smallest so you can actually
06:48see it's not a big dinosaur it's sort of almost human sized in many respects. There we go.
06:54It does look quite comical. It's great. Someone like Monty Python who expects some music in the background
06:58stop it there because it's quite clear the human is toast. The human is going to be eaten by
07:03almost everything on the screen there but Tyrannosaurus Rex is running at quite a significant
07:08speed at 18 miles per hour. That's significant for a big animal. This is a five ton animal the size
07:14of an African bull elephant but the next stage though is to see well this is just pointysaurus
07:20racing. Can we actually get a skeleton to run and that's where we're going next and we're learning
07:26by scanning in each individual bone of a dinosaur now piecing them together strapping on the right
07:32muscle groups and getting the muscles to fire off in the right patterns. Well we don't decide that
07:36the computer does that's the genius of this software and it literally learns how to walk
07:42and here we can see well this is Tyrannosaurus Rex food. Why does it matter to know how fast a
07:46dinosaur can move? We're actually bringing the animals back to life so we understand more about
07:50the ecology and behaviour of these dinosaurs so what you're looking at here is this is this is
07:55not just animation this is science. Scientists define fossils as any evidence of ancient life
08:06which has been naturally preserved and fossils can come in different forms.
08:16Body fossils which are the actual fossilized remains of prehistoric plants and creatures
08:22and trace fossils which are the fossilized evidence of activity such as trackways and burrows.
08:28Right up on the northwest coast amazingly you can find trace fossil evidence of prehistoric
08:34human life. The catch is that you can't physically find it most of the time. It's hiding under the
08:42sand and seawater only exposed from time to time between tides and after it's been exposed
08:49it doesn't take long before it disappears forever.
08:58I've come a little way up the coast now to meet up with one of Britain's keenest amateur
09:04investigators of ancient life. Now I don't know whether you know this but amateur means one who
09:10loves and Gordon Roberts is definitely a man who loves his subject. Gordon Roberts comes down to
09:18the beach here at Formby almost every day combing the sands for evidence of prehistoric life.
09:25What he finds are ancient human footprints up to 5,000 years old.
09:32These footprints are really special unlike the dinosaur imprints we saw earlier which
09:37were literally turned to stone these footprints are still slightly soft to the touch. So explain
09:44to me what's going on here I mean I can see a beautiful outline of two footprints here I mean
09:50it's so clear. You can see from here that this is a left foot. Yes clearly I mean the toes would
09:56be here there's the heel imprint. If we were to measure toe to heel you get 28 centimetres
10:05multiply that by seven and you get an indication approximately of the height. So 196 centimetres?
10:11That's right. That's pretty tall. Yes could get me died.
10:16Now what I don't quite understand is the process. I can imagine back in time there would have been
10:21people, animals walking across sticky sandy mud but then what has happened to reveal them today?
10:27Well the conditions were right to harden the stratum and the footprint in in there then perhaps
10:35a covering of blown sand from the prehistoric low dunes. The next tidal incursion would put
10:42The next tidal incursion would put a lid over the top of that and so it builds up over the
10:48centuries over the millennia. And then sea levels? Three and a half thousand years give or take
10:55and these were sealed in.
11:05Gordon says this is like tickling their toes tickling the toes of human being from 5,000 years
11:11ago. All this evidence could be lost to science but a team from Bournemouth University
11:23scanned the Formby footprints in 3D to virtually preserve them forever.
11:30Matthew Bennett is leading this pioneering research
11:34which gives us an intriguing window on the world of our past.
11:39So this is a footprint from Formby? This is one of the Formby footprints
11:43and what we're doing with it with the footprints is we're recording them and using laser technology
11:49so we're digitising them in three dimensions really really accurately to sort of less than
11:53a fraction of a millimetre. I can't believe that this is actually something from 5,000 years ago
11:59the detail that you've got there that comes out in the scan is quite amazing. Oh it's a fantastic
12:04way of preserving and recording the footprints because what we do with a scan like this is we
12:10look for anatomical points on the foot so things like the the tip of the heel the tops of the toes
12:19and then what we do is we do lots of measurements between these different anatomical points turn it
12:25into numbers in other words and then compare those numbers with the same numbers obtained
12:30from a footprint say in Africa or North America and then you can begin to compare and you can look
12:35for the differences and the similarities and that's where it becomes really really powerful
12:39because these are modern humans homo sapiens but there are also footprints found in East Africa
12:45that relate to our ancestors one to three million year old very early species of humans and we can
12:53begin to look at the differences how they've evolved how they've changed in time and how the
12:58geometry of the foot and the bones of the foot have changed
13:05the humans that made the tracks at Formby were homo sapiens
13:09men and women who were biologically identical to how we are today
13:17but to learn more about our ancient ancestors we need to look at their fossilized bones
13:24this skeleton was discovered in Paviland Cave in South Wales found back in the 1800s it was
13:32covered in red ochre a sort of dye so became known as the Red Lady of Paviland
13:40there's not much left of the skeleton now as you can see just a few of the bones but this is a
13:47really important fossil it was the first ever anatomically modern prehistoric human to be
13:53discovered in Britain and significantly the Red Lady of Paviland is evidence for the oldest known
14:00ceremonial burial in Europe this picture is an artist's impression of what that early burial
14:15may have looked like periwinkle shells necklaces and trinkets were found with the bones suggesting
14:22high status it's possible the red ochre found on the body and at the site was used as part of the
14:29funeral rites although we have no way of knowing for sure what we do know is that the Red Lady
14:36was classified wrongly when originally named he is in fact a man
14:43we also know that roughly a quarter of his diet was comprised of fish
14:48because of particular proteins that have been preserved in the bones
14:55carbon dating techniques show that he lived 29 000 years ago during the ice age and you can go
15:03and see him today at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff
15:15in Britain our climate has been influenced by a combination of global climate change
15:21as well as our physical position on the globe
15:25if you imagine the warm and sunny climate of the Caribbean you can get an idea of what Britain
15:31would have been like in the Silurian this geological time period took its name from a tribe
15:38that lived here in Wales the Siluris it began about 440 million years ago and marked a pivotal
15:47million years ago and marked a pivotal point in evolution it lasted less than 30 million years
15:55but it was a critical moment in earth's history this was the time when plants and some animals
16:03became solidly established on land and new ecosystems began evolving in the seas
16:09it was significantly hotter back then and warm seas covered much of Britain
16:18perfect conditions for the very first coral reefs to form well it's far from tropical today
16:26and to think that we used to have an exotic climate is almost unfeasible
16:33until you see the evidence
16:38these exquisitely preserved fossils connect us to a vanished world
16:44to an important stage in the evolution of ancient reefs
16:51these creatures have been fossilized in limestone and are the very best examples of early reefs
16:57like this in the world
17:04here we see a reconstruction of what that early reef system would have been like
17:27when the reefs were alive Shropshire was south of the equator and submerged by sea
17:36the rock layer which was created then known as Wenlock limestone stretches all the way from here
17:42in the west to central England Wenlock edge is a limestone escarpment or ridge that reaches up to
17:50300 meters high Sue Cook is a geologist who specializes in the study of rocks and fossils
17:59Sue we've got a whole collection of beautiful fossil specimens that you can find in Wenlock
18:04limestone and the thing that strikes me about this particular piece is that there are so many
18:09different types of fossils just in this one slab oh yes this is the thing about the Wenlock
18:14limestone it's so crammed pack full of fossils and so many different types you've got little
18:22shells and these are called brachiopods lots of different varieties of them you have trilobites
18:28that's the tail end of a trilobite there you have corals that's a sort of coral we call a rugose
18:34coral over there little sea colonial animals that live together and these are called bryozoans
18:42we've got ones that look like nets there and ones that look like sticks there's just so many
18:47different things and what about these Sue I think these are my favorites yes these are crinoids
18:53are the sea lilies yes they're often known as sea lilies but they're not plants they're a sea animal
18:58okay so what would this creature this animal the crinoid have looked like when it was alive and
19:04growing on the reef it's a relative of the sea urchin and the starfish so if you think of a
19:09starfish on a stalk you've basically got your crinoid so a long tall stalk made up of tiny
19:15little plates we call ossicles one on top of each other and at the top of that there's a mouth
19:20surrounded by tentacles we call arms and it waves around in the water it filter feeds so those arms
19:27create tiny little currents that send all the particles in the water down towards the mouth
19:33so yes definitely this is a single creature with a mouth it's clearly an animal yes and what I
19:38love about this specimen is that you can see those individual plates that make up the stem
19:44so clearly you so rarely see preservation like this Sue what do you find special about the
19:51Wenlock limestone oh I love it because it's just so full of fossils I used to bring field parties
19:57out to here on Wenlock edge and challenge them not to find me a fossil you can just
20:02trip over the rocks in them it's absolutely jam-packed it's fantastic
20:08paleontology links us to forgotten worlds and
20:12ancient lives and you can find fossils in the most surprising places
20:23a car engine manufacturer may not seem the likeliest hotbed of fossil finds but for this
20:29particular factory that's exactly what it is as Ford were beginning to build their plant at
20:38bridge end in Wales they accidentally came across a remarkable discovery
20:44an unexpected collection of rare and precious fossils fortunately they realized the significance
20:51of the find and ensured that all the fossils were rescued and that scientists were informed
20:57about the site now the engines that the plant produces over 800,000 of them a year
21:04may well run on fossil fuels but here at least they have another connection to fossils
21:14and here they are
21:20these are the fossils that were rescued
21:22they've been fossilized in the mineral silica in an unusual form of preservation
21:31fossils preserved this way can give an insight into animals that are usually missing from the
21:36fossil record because you get almost three times more species than in normal preservation
21:44scientists use an unusual technique to extract them from the rocks they were found in
21:49acid dissolves the rocks around the fossils leaving them intact
21:57and although acid can't harm them the touch of a finger could make them crumble they are so
22:04delicate you can hold them up to the light and see right through them
22:09fragile links to a prehistoric world
22:21we can trace our interest in fossils to our ancient ancestors even neanderthals living
22:2780 000 years ago collected fossils and through time they have been endlessly
22:35and through time there have been endless theories and beliefs about what fossils actually were
22:45ancient greek scientists thought fossilized shells and fossilized impressions of fish
22:51found high in the mountains with the remains of ancient sea creatures
22:56pythagoras and herodotus thought that if marine species were found in land it was because that
23:02land was once submerged in water rocks containing these fossils must have been formed under the sea
23:12we've known for quite a while now that this is exactly right but for 2 000 years
23:19their theory was lost to science because aristotle in the fourth century bc decided
23:25fossils were produced by vaporous exhalations which came from deep inside the earth
23:33so
23:43it was in the 16th century that things got back on the right track again the development of what
23:49we call stratigraphy or the study of layers that make up the earth's surface helped scientists
23:55understand the truth we know now that fossils are evidence of ancient life
24:06back then fossils were identified as anything dug up from the ground
24:12so
24:25here at the mystical setting of caerphilly castle mike bassett from the national museum of wales
24:31can tell us more about the myth and folklore of fossils now what what about this wonderful
24:37specimen here with this carved head what was this all about this is probably the most remarkable
24:42example of the interpretation that people made of fossils this is particularly associated with
24:49with rocks of what we call jurassic age about 150 million years old people didn't recognize
24:55them as fossils but they thought they were snakes but of course the problem they had was there was
25:01no head on the fossils these are things called ammonites so what they did was to reconstruct
25:05what they thought was a snake they carved the heads back onto the fossil what what are some
25:10of your other favorite stories well because many fossils assumed some kind of mystical significance
25:20this is this is a fossil sea urchin and if you look at it very closely it looks like a loaf of
25:25bread and so people assume that this this was bread produced by fairies they're called fairy
25:32loaves and because they were thought to be food very often these fossils were buried with people
25:38so skeletons are known where fossils like this these sea urchins were laid around the body so
25:43that the body would take the food to heaven with them what a wonderful idea i mean looking at this
25:48of course to me it looks exactly like a fossilized sea urchin now but you can almost imagine it
25:53rising there were different types as well this is this is a related sea urchin and you can see
25:58this this one is heart-shaped so in some cases these were laid around the bodies as well do you
26:02think it's sad in a way that now we see fossils as something very scientific and we've lost a bit
26:07of the mysticism about them yes and and no of course we now use fossils for very different
26:13purposes and and i think that that the great step that uh that scientists made in the in the 18th
26:19century have given us a much stronger insight into how life evolved on on earth but but these
26:25myths are fascinating just to understand the process that that uh that led to us believing that
26:31through history fossils have held the key to understanding our own past
26:46the fossils you find here in the west and northwest of britain
26:50allow us a powerful glimpse of that past
27:01so
27:17there's been life on earth for almost four billion years
27:22the fossilized remains of ancient lives are tactile solid memories of worlds long gone
27:31without fossils many of our land's prehistoric secrets would remain unknown fossils unlock the
27:40mysteries of the past and inspire the explorer in all of us
27:51so
28:21you