Walking with Prehistoric Beasts (TV Mini Series)

New Dawn (2001)

Kenneth Branagh: Narrator

Quotes 

• Kenneth Branagh : For the first and only time in its history, birds rule the earth.

• Kenneth Branagh : The last dinosaurs were already living on a sick planet, when their nemesis arrived- from space. A meteor ten kilometres wide slammed into Earth to mark the end, of the reign of dinosaurs.

  [Footage of storms, then a clear dark sky view] 

  Kenneth Branagh : This series is about what happened next.

• Kenneth Branagh : The dinosaurs might be long gone, but the left the world a vicious legacy. Their direct descendants are the birds.

• Kenneth Branagh : At this time in Europe's history, Germany is at the center of much volcanic activity, and this whole forest is riddled with geothermal springs.

• Kenneth Branagh : [as Gastornis tears at a Propalaeotherium's corpse]  This is a world where birds eat horses!

• Kenneth Branagh : [the Gastornis has returned to her nest only to see what the ants have done]  The biggest predator here, humbled by the smallest.

• Kenneth Branagh : [about the Ambulocetus]  Although his ancestors hunted on land, Ambulocetus has evolved to be far more at home in the water. In fact, his descendants will take this to a greater extreme: you are looking at the very earliest form of whale. Ambulocetus in fact means 'walking whale'.

• Kenneth Branagh : [about the early form of monkeys]  Among their descendants in millions of years time, will be a hairless type of ape called man.

• Kenneth Branagh : Today the Leptictidium is the survivor, but ironically the future holds a different outcome for these mammals. The Leptictidium and her kind are destined to become extinct when this hot wet world gets cooler and drier, and the world's forests start to disappear. Ambulocetus is the one with the big future: he is the ancestor of the whales, the most magnificent dynasty of mammals, and mammals are about to take over the world!