Walking with Monsters

From the makers of Walking With Dinosaurs comes an epic and entertaining new exploration of early life on Earth, revealing that before the age dinosaurs, a succession of fantastical animals and plants ruled the planet.

Using state of the art visual effects, Walking With Monsters recreates a time when a two-ton predatory fish came on land to hunt, when four-metre sea scorpions sliced sushi in the shallows and when just one species of lumbering reptile represented 80 per cent of all life. For the first time, this special two-hour presentation uncovers and recreates these creatures and the bizarre world they inhabited.

Drawing on the knowledge of more than 600 scientists, state-of-the-art technology and animation, this special spans more than five million years and brings to life the weird, wonderful and sometimes terrifying creatures that roamed before the dinosaurs with amazing realism.

Using real footage plus innovative morphing technology, this special goes inside the body of our monster ancestors for the first time to learn what creature gave humanity our very first limb, our heart and even our brain. Witness the struggle for the fittest as it has never been seen before - a war between animals more strange, savage and successful than any dinosaur that would follow.

Cambrian period
550 million years ago: With life still concentrated in the water, this was a time when predators began to evolve with the emergence of teeth, claws, hooks and other "weapons." A period marked by great variety, all manner of life swam, stalked and shuffled in the water, including the Trilobite which gave rise to crabs and insects, and the Pikaia from which everything with a back bone - sharks to man - can be traced back to.

Silurian period
Fast forward to the Silurian period, 410 million years ago, as creatures from the sea make the first forays onto land, including the scorpion - an evolutionary success story. In a world dominated by scorpions, our distant fishy ancestor, the Alaspis, was making the first journey from sea to lake to spawn.

Devonian period
Moving into the Devonian period 360 million years ago, the scorpions were overtaken by fish as top predators - some growing to 10-metres long. Some of these fantastical fish ventured onto land and found the environment so appealing that fins grew firm and digits developed at the end of these early limbs. This new creature was the Acanthostega, ancestor to all birds, reptiles and frogs.

Carboniferous period
Great forests took root and swamps dominated the Carboniferous period, 300 million years ago, giving rise to metre-long dragonflies and huge spiders with leg-spans of nearly a metre. But most deadly of all was the Arthropleura, an animal that looked like a three-metre long bug but moved like an anaconda.

Early Permian
After an ice age wiped out the swamps and the giant insects, new group of animals and plants took over during the Early Permian period, 280 million years ago. Reptiles resilient enough to cope with the dry, cold conditions would survive - and the king of these reptiles was the giant, sail-finned Dimetrodon.

Late Permian
Forty million years later, during the Late Permian period 240 million years ago, Earth had turned into a desert planet and precipitated the largest mass extinction ever.Only five per cent of life survived and the herbivorous, lumbering Lystrosaurus - a precursor to dinosaurs and the earliest ancestor of all mammals - represented much of our planet's animal life.