When will Dinosaurs: The Final Day with David Attenborough be on TV?
Dinosaurs: The Final Day with David Attenborough will air on BBC One on Friday 15th April 2022, and will be available to stream on BBC iPlayer afterwards.
What is Dinosaurs: The Final Day with David Attenborough about?
The 90-minute film reveals what happened when an asteroid the size of Mount Everest hit the planet 66 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous Period.
The story is centred not on the impact site, the Chicxulub Crater in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, but on a little-known spot in the Hell Creek formation of North Dakota. It’s there that palaeontologist Robert DePalma and his team made a remarkable discovery in a prehistoric graveyard DePalma’s named Tanis. What they found were astonishingly well-preserved fossilised creatures, buried in a mysterious crumbly layer of rock.
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Among the fossils unearthed were fish, the tooth of a Tyrannosaurus rex, an almost complete turtle and Triceratops remains. But it’s the crumbly rock they were found in that’s truly astonishing.
The programme follows DePalma and his team as they discover the rock at Tanis is full of ejecta spherules – tiny beads of molten glass which, over millions of years, have turned into clay. These spherules were created by an asteroid impact that blasted molten and vaporised rock into space where it solidified and fell back to Earth as tiny spheres. Analysis of the spherules shows they came from the impact at Chicxulub – the impact believed to have condemned the dinosaurs to extinction.
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This discovery makes Tanis an incredible site for learning about the last day of the dinosaurs, providing a detailed record, preserved in rock, of the moments after the asteroid hit Earth. With exclusive access to the dig site, BBC cameras follow DePalma and his team as they hunt for evidence that can shed light on their demise.
Throughout the programme state-of-the-art special effects transport Attenborough back in time to the Late Cretaceous to witness the creatures who lived at Tanis, before re-creating, in extraordinary detail, the events of the last day of the dinosaurs.
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Who is David Attenborough?
Sir David Attenborough is one of the world’s best-known TV presenters and narrators, famed for his work on natural history documentaries for the BBC and other broadcasters. His recent programmes include Dynasties II, Attenborough’s Wonder of Song, Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard and The Green Planet.
Main image: Sir David Attenborough is the presenter of Dinosaurs: The Final Day, with David Attenborough. © BBC/Ali Pares/Sam Barker/Chris Lavington-Woods/Lola Post Production