(dramatic music)
(birds chirping)
Europe is a continent of contrasts,
with ancient landscapes and icons of modern civilization.
From the densely populated central areas,
to the sheer endless expanses of Russia.
It's home to invaluable natural monuments
from the highest peaks of the Alps,
to the coast of the great ocean.
Geologist Colin Devey is on an expedition across Europe.
It's a huge continent and there's lots to discover.
He's on a quest to experience
the beauty of European nature.
Fascinating.
And discover amazing landscapes
packed with mysteries.
They bear evidence of lost inhabitants,
their origins, and their transformations.
Accompany Colin Devey on a journey,
through the natural history of a continent
from prehistoric beginnings to the present day.
(ominous music)
Rough terrain marks the northwest of the continent.
Scotland has some of the most pristine landscapes in Europe.
It's June, the last full moon before the summer solstice.
A Stone Age cult site on Lewis Island.
These stones have been here for 3,000 years.
Experts believe their arrangement
follows the course of the moon.
They emit a special magic,
especially now in the bright summer nights.
The rock that makes up these monuments
holds a deeper meaning for the island and its inhabitants.
(birds chirping)
(dramatic music)
It's the basic substance of this landscape,
people built their houses from it
as protection against the changeable weather.
The robust rock also provides shelter for many animals.
(birds cawing)
Large populations of sea birds breed on the steep cliffs,
such as common murres.
(birds cawing)
Whose young are now hatching.
Razorbills and cormorants.
The soft earth beneath the rocks
is ideal for puffins to dig their nests.
(puffin cawing)
They're undisturbed here.
The young are safe and the cliffs provide
perfect starting points for an excursion.
(upbeat music)
A diverse ecosystem has developed around these rocks.
It's one of the richest habitats in Europe.
And it's not just about the big animals.
Countless microorganisms live in the water,
which in turn attract fish and larger predators.
Here there's plenty for everyone.
The northern gannet pierces the deep
at high speed to catch prey.
(dramatic music)
This is a natural paradise thriving on stone.
Welcome to the beautiful Island of Lewis.
Now it's the middle of summer, but it's really quite cold.
The reason for that lies 2,000 kilometers in this direction.
It's the southern tip of Greenland
and between us there's only the open North Atlantic.
Now the landscape here is raw and ancient,
and that fits really well with the rocks.
These rocks are called gneiss.
They're very hard and solid
and they were formed three billion years ago.
They're some of the oldest rocks in the whole of Europe.
They were formed deep in the earth
under high-pressure and high-temperature
and that's made them very compact
and very resistant to erosion
and that's why we still find them here.
And they form the core, the nucleus of our continent.
Now originally, these rocks were laid down
on the floor of an ocean as the earth
was only a quarter as old as it is now.
And that earth was a way different place
to what we find here.
Even rock changes.
(wind howling)
A few millennia ago,
the coastline might have looked like this.
This rock gate does not yet exist.
The mighty ocean is still hard at work here
and three billion years ago, not even the coast exists yet.
A huge ocean lies under a hostile atmosphere.
Islands, small primordial continents
are formed by volcanic activity
and something's happening in the ocean.
(ominous music)
The chemical composition is right.
As the perfect combination
of nearly infinite variables align,
the first lifeforms emerge.
So far, there are only simple organisms,
the first steps of evolution.
That's when it happens.
In the depth, the Lewis gneiss begins to form
under extreme conditions.
High temperatures and immense pressure shape the stone,
which today is one of the oldest in Europe.
(wind howling)
This is how the first chapters of European natural history
were written in the sea.
(upbeat music)
Colin Devey accompanies fisherman to the Scottish Sea.
As a geologist, he's a specialist
in the development of the oceans and their natural history.
(birds cawing)
So the core of our continent was produced
three billion years ago.
That's an impossible amount of time to grasp, isn't it?
But even then, there was an ocean
and life on earth probably developed in that ocean.
And even now, the creatures that live in the ocean
are very old types of life.
Hopefully we're catching some of them right now.
I'm terribly interested to see what these guys
are gonna bring on board.
Since the emergence of Lewis gneiss,
life on earth has developed rapidly.
(dramatic music)
And the ocean still holds traces of that development.
With every catch, fishermen capture a piece of prehistory.
(birds cawing)
Okay, the fishermen have given me
some things from their catch.
Let's have a look and see what they got.
First up is this little cod.
What a beauty.
It's on the boney fishes and boney fish appeared
on our plant about 200 million years ago.
Now another boney fish of course,
things like this, the plaice.
What else have we got?
Oh, langoustines, they're a member of the crustaceans
and crustaceans are also a very old type of life.
380 millions years old is the first fossil
that we know of the crustacean.
And last but not least a real treasure,
this is a lamprey.
Now lampreys are a member of a really,
really old type of life.
They're not fish, they don't have an lower jaw
so they can't chew things
and their ancestors lived in the oceans
540 million years ago.
Now this guy looks as if he's still alive.
I'm gonna put him back.
(boat motor humming)
(dramatic music)
A truly peculiar
prehistoric animal, the lamprey.
An elegant swimmer in its familiar environment.
This parasite feeds by boring into the flesh of other fish
to suck their blood.
It's extremely rare and particularly protected in Europe.
Their natural home is the cold
oxygen-rich waters of the north,
where many creatures remind us of a bygone era.
(soothing classical music)
Prehistoric animals are widespread, like the crab.
Or the moon jellyfish.
The basking shark also seems like a relic from the past.
These majestic animals roam thousands of kilometers
through the sea every year.
But what did the ocean really look like
over 500 million years ago?
Plants have already lived in the sea for a long time now,
but animals are rapidly catching up.
Mysterious worms leave their traces
in the sediment of the seabed.
Jellyfish are the first animals
to swim through the sea with their own muscle power.
(ominous music)
Predators appear, many of them strange arthropods,
with claws and compound eyes.
An amazing variety of trilobites live on the ocean floor.
They have robust exoskeletons
that protect them from predators.
All main groups of the animal kingdom develop at this time,
including the ancestor of the lamprey.
It possess a special innovation of evolution, a spine,
that provides stability and bolsters its locomotion.
Sharks came later in evolution,
but these sea-dwellers, so different in age and size
still meet to this day.
For the basking shark, the lamprey is an annoying parasite.
(dramatic music)
Scotland's waters are richly populated
with prehistoric animals.
Perhaps this explains why some legends have persisted
through the generations.
It's a strange and kind of mystical place at Loch Ness.
I remember when I was a kid,
we came here with the family on holiday,
and my parents went swimming in there.
Not a chance that I would have joined them
and even now, I'm not going in.
Although of course as a scientist,
I know there is no such thing as monsters.
Geologically speaking, this is also
a very interesting place.
At about the same time as those creatures
that we've just seen were developing out in the oceans,
here two continents were colliding.
Let's have a look.
(electronic beeping)
On the one side, there's Laurentia.
That's what we now call America.
On the other side, Baltica, that's Norway and Sweden.
And they collided right here
producing a huge mountain range.
Now I can tell you about it from down here,
but I can show it to you from up in the mountains.
(dramatic music) (birds chirping)
Loch Ness is located in the heart
of the Scottish Highlands.
With a relatively low population density,
there's enough space for nature.
The ascent is steep, and soon the forest thins out.
Colin encounters the inhabitants of the raised bogs.
Here, where the black grouse fight in early summer,
the typical landscape of the highlands blossoms.
(upbeat music)
Heather adds a special shine to the already amazing view.
For a short time, the otherwise barren highlands
explode in a unique splendor of color.
Well, that climb was worth it.
Of course, for the scenery but also for the geology.
Look at it.
I'm standing on Baltica.
Over there, the other side of Loch Ness is Laurentia.
The Great Glen Fault runs through here
and separated those two continents.
500 million years ago, there was a huge mountain range here.
(rocks rumbling)
Wow.
Now the whole area will have been shaken time and time again
by earthquakes because we know that these two continents
rubbed passed each other over 200 kilometers.
(rocks cracking)
Wind and weather has worn the mountains down to stumps now.
Now the last thing that happened here
was during the last ice age.
A glacier carved out Loch Ness.
And although it's a really impressive lake,
it's nowhere near the total length of this plate boundary.
The elongated shape of the famous lake
hints that it's part of a much large structure.
(dramatic music)
Loch Ness belongs to a border of continental dimensions
that stretches across the Northern Hemisphere.
This structure was created some 450 million years ago.
The collision of two old continents
led to the formation of Europe's first
primeval mountain range, the Caledonides.
The romantic landscapes of the Scottish Highlands
still bear witness to the former high mountain range.
(dramatic music)
The next chapter of European natural history
is written in Central Europe.
Colin crosses the North Sea.
He's headed south in search of the center of the continent.
The European mainland, here lie the most densely populated
ares of Europe with their cities,
industry,
and traffic.
Large metropolitan regions.
Paris, one of the centers of European culture.
And further southeast, Frankfurt, a major financial hub.
(plane engine humming)
However, the geographical center
of the continent is further east.
Regensburg, southwest of the Bavarian forest.
The landscape forms a unit with the Bohemian Forests
of the Czech Republic.
One of the oldest regions
of Central Europe in geological history,
and the center of the continent.
(dramatic music)
On a small mountain, the Tillenberg.
And there I am, the middle of Europe,
and about 10 meters from the Czech, German border.
Now of course the midpoint of a continent
is impossible to define.
But Austrian scientists 150 years ago
said this is where it is.
And so, we've got this beautiful stone standing here.
But this place is important for other reasons.
(electronic beeping)
350 million years ago, two continents collided here
and for the first time ever,
Europe existed as a single unit.
At the same time, a massive mountain range was built,
probably the largest mountains
that this planet's ever seen,
and they formed a band around half the global.
The remains of these mountains
can still be found all over Europe,
mostly not higher than 1,800 meters.
But nevertheless, these Mittelgebirge
as they're called, running all through Europe
are some of the most beautiful landscapes we have.
(dramatic music)
From the Ural Mountains in the east,
to the Rhine in the West,
Germany is home to the remains of the so-called Variscites,
named after an ancient Germanic tribe.
They're a welcome retreat for wild animals
in the otherwise densely populated area.
After facing near extinction,
the Eurasian lynx roams through some of these forests again.
(relaxing music)
(boar grunting)
The wild boar is a different case altogether.
It's among the most adaptable of all wild animals
and can be found almost anywhere.
(stag braying)
In September, stags gather in the clearings
for the rutting season.
But the forest is much more than just the home
of these typical inhabitants.
It's a living system,
functioning like a single entity in minute detail.
Many creatures depend on each other,
like mosaic pieces forming one big whole.
They all create the habitat that we know
as the enchanting forest of the Central Uplands,
important natural areas throughout Europe.
(birds chirping)
(dramatic music)
The Massif Central in Southern France.
With its gently rising slopes, Mont Caroux
is a typical remnant from the time of the Variscites.
Today, only about 1,000 meters high,
a perfect home for wild sheep, mouflon.
These graceful animals are often seen on Mont Caroux.
The search the Heric River Valley for food.
The Massif Central is a popular destination for hikers,
an exciting stage for Colin Devey's research.
The Gorge d'Heric offers hints
to the great past of the Variscites.
(water rushing)
So how can we know that these gently rolling hills
are all that remains of a once gigantic mountain range?
We can look back into the past in this gorge,
and the rocks will tell us something about
how big the mountain range really was.
The water has done a remarkable job.
The constant force of the stream
has hollowed out the rock massif.
(dramatic music)
The gorge leads several kilometers into the mountain.
350 million years ago, these rocks formed the base
of the highest mountain range of all time.
So we're now right in the middle of the mountain
and the rocks are telling us everything we need to know
about the enormous pressures
and temperatures they've experienced.
The high pressure has made the mineral
separate from one another and produce this banding.
And the high temperatures caused
these big white crystals to form.
The temperatures were in some places so high
that the rock started to melt.
We look up behind me here, you see this white vein.
It's magma produced deep underground
and pressed out of the rock,
and it's flown up towards the surfaces.
Gives us some impression of how huge
this mountain range must have been.
(dramatic music)
The traces of the magma flows are everywhere.
These areas used to bear the burden of the mountains.
350 million years ago,
it was a truly gigantic mountain range,
wider and higher than the Himalayas today.
It stretched across half the globe
and was so wide that today,
it would straddle the distance
from the South of France to Norway.
A time full of contrasts.
(crickets chirping)
Extensive swamp forests lie in the valleys
beyond the mountain peaks.
(insect buzzing)
They were home to the first land plants and giant insects.
Dragonflies as large as hawks.
(ominous music)
The forests are extremely productive.
Peat forms in the ground and over time
is transformed into coal.
Bituminous coal, for us humans, an important fuel source,
and for a long time, the driving force
of European industrialization.
(dramatic music)
Many old mines are decaying or declared monuments.
Like in the Ruhr area, which was at the center
of Germany's economic growth in the 1950s and '60s.
Globally, coal extraction is still on the rise.
It's estimated that the black coal reserves
formed over millions of years
will last for only another century.
(ominous music)
Wherever coal mining towers stand today,
there used to be swamp forests in the Carboniferous period.
(birds chirping) (relaxing music)
(birds cawing)
Portugal, the western-most point of mainland Europe.
The steady swell of the great ocean
has formed a steep coast.
On the cliffs, relics of the past come to light.
The coast is more than 150 million years old.
Working on the steep slope is risky,
but scientists are often rewarded with sensational finds.
Octavio Mateus, chief paleontologist
shows Colin Devey his findings.
The ground is full of dinosaur bones.
These cliffs are made of rocks
which are late Jurassic in age,
about 150, 200 million years.
And here we see a sauropod bone.
And in the same layer, we find four more.
This telling, there is probably entire sauropod
inside this cliff.
Oh really?
Quite amazing, and look at that.
That's a big sauropod bone right there.
We see the peripheral bone
and the cast of a very large animal.
That was a very big sauropod, wasn't it?
My goodness. It was indeed.
My goodness.
(dramatic music)
It's one of the largest bones
in the body of any vertebrate, a femur.
And the femur's owner was one of the largest land creatures
ever to set foot on our continent.
A truly giant quadruped.
It lived in the tropical coastal landscapes.
In the Late Jurassic, these habitats are very common,
almost everywhere in the world.
Temperatures worldwide are higher than in modern times.
Similar to today's elephants,
sauropods have massive column-like legs
that stand directly under their bodies
to support the enormous weight.
Over 35 tons, and up to 30 meters long.
(electronic beeping) (ominous music)
(dinosaur groaning)
These giants don't care for their offspring.
They hide their eggs in the loose sand on the seashore.
The young have to fend for themselves.
A risk strategy because there are plenty
of predators roaming about, like this Allosaurus europaeus,
one of the largest carnivores at the time.
(wind howling)
(dinosaur growling)
It's the heyday of the dinosaurs.
They will rule the earth for over 170 million years,
an extremely long reign,
during which their world
and our continent changes dramatically.
Octavio and his team are finding
amazing things in this cliff.
The fascinating stuff is that they're finding
exactly the same types of dinosaurs
thousands of kilometers away over there in America.
The dinosaur groups are so similar,
they could almost be brother and sister.
Now how on earth can that happen?
Well, the answer to that lies out there
in the middle of the Atlantic.
(ominous music)
The European and American coasts
are more than 5,000 kilometers apart.
And in the middle of the sheer endless expanse
is an abundance of life.
(dramatic music)
A sperm whale, the largest-toothed whale on earth.
This female has her calf.
The young animal has to be nursed by its mother
for almost three years.
(whales clicking)
But they are not alone.
Manta rays feed on plankton,
tiny microorganisms that are difficult to see
with the naked eye.
And with them come many other fish,
attracted by the nutrient-rich waters.
The smaller fish in turn are followed by big hunters.
But why is this mysterious meeting place here,
in the middle of a vast ocean?
It's these rocks rising
from the seafloor called seamounts.
Nutrients are flushed up seamounts from the depths,
making these waters extremely species rich,
from microscopic plankton to myriad fish.
(relaxing music)
An underwater paradise, and Colin Devey
is right in the middle of it.
(oxygen hissing)
It's amazing how many fish there are here.
Oh, and there's quite a current.
I've got to hold on tight.
This is a biodiversity hotspot
and the reason for that is these rocks.
They create an environment
that attracts the fish, absolutely astounding.
Situated in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean,
the sea mountains offer protection and refuge
to many marine animals.
Between the rocks, there are numerous
hiding places and caves.
But how was the rock formed?
(oxygen hissing)
So I've had a look at these walls
and they're made completely of basalt lava.
I'm in this lava tube that's been opened up
by the waves because I'm on the top of a volcano.
Deep below me is really intense volcanic activity
and that's built this whole mountain.
I'm gonna go have a look around.
(relaxing music)
This whole area is extremely large.
Colin's position can only be determined from a distance.
The rock face is only a small point
at the top of a mountain.
The mountaintop in turn is only part of a massif.
(dramatic music)
A whole mountain range.
The longest mountain range on earth.
The Mid-Atlantic Ridge crosses the Atlantic Ocean
stretching 20,000 kilometers.
But not all peaks end underwater.
Some break through the surface.
And some of them are large islands.
The highest peaks of this undersea mountain range
are well-known to us.
They are the Azores.
The archipelago is where the European
and North American Plates meet,
and marks the actual western border
of the European Continent.
The highest peak rises 2,350 meters above sea level,
the steep tip of the Island of Pico.
Ponta do Pico is a volcano
with a striking crater and sparse vegetation.
It's a unique habitat with lichens, small bushes,
and only a few animals surviving near the sparse summit.
(relaxing music)
(wind howling)
The lower regions are covered
in enchanting subtropical rainforests.
(wind howling)
300 kilometers further east, it is a whole different world.
Santa Maria, this island is less rugged
with wide plains and gentle elevations.
As different as these islands are,
the stones here bear witness to a common origin.
This is a piece of basaltic lava
and you find pieces like this all over the Azores Islands
because they're all volcanoes.
But they look really different.
The reason for those differences
have to do with different ages,
and age is really important in the Atlantic.
Let's look at that in a bit more detail.
(electronic beeping)
This is the present day Atlantic seafloor.
Now, let's turn the clock back 240 million years.
Europe and America are part
of a supercontinent that we call Pangaea.
If we let time run forward a little bit,
we get to 220 million years
and the first little bit of water appears
in the middle of that supercontinent.
It's the birth of the Atlantic.
And from that time on, the Atlantic is gonna grow.
Europe and America progressively
move apart from one another.
At eight million years, tiny little point
appears in the middle of the Atlantic, that's Santa Maria.
The other Azores Islands appear one after the other,
and at 300,000 years ago,
Pico pops its head out of the water.
And that's the reason why they look so different.
There are seven million years between those two islands.
Every bit of the Atlantic seafloor
has its own specific age.
In the meantime, there are 5,000 kilometers
between America and Europe.
Or as a geologist would say,
over 200 million years of Earth's history.
Like the entire Atlantic,
the Azores were formed on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
The young Island of Pico
as well as the oldest island in the Azores, Santa Maria,
whose mountains have already been worn down
by millions of years of erosion.
(wind howling) (dramatic music)
What all the islands have in common
is that they are home to a unique, sensitive environment
far away from the big continents,
something special has developed here.
(birds chirping)
(upbeat music)
Tarphius, a bark beetle,
is one of the smallest inhabitants.
It can be found on all the Azores Islands,
but on each island, it looks a little different.
(birds chirping)
The Azores bullfinch, also known as priolo,
is a finch that only exists here.
These ancient islanders live side-by-side
with the chaffinch, which was brought in by settlers
just like the Madeira lizard.
The Mid-Atlantic Ridge has created small natural paradises.
A new seabed is still being created here today.
(relaxing music)
The west coast of Portugal was separated from America
220 million years ago.
Since then, the distance between the continents
has been growing by several centimeters each year.
The great predator Allosaurus
lived in Portugal 152 million years ago.
Back then, the dinosaurs on both sides of the Atlantic
looked very similar, like relatives.
An indication that Europe and North America
were connected for a long time.
(dinosaur growling)
(dramatic music)
The Atlantic Ocean has had a crucial influence
on the development of the European Continent.
Europe continues to change after the emergence
of the great ocean.
With temperatures rising worldwide,
much of the continent is underwater, an island world.
Its extent from west to east however
already corresponded to the distance
from Portugal to the Urals today.
(dramatic music)
Colin Devey has set himself a goal
to walk through Europe from the southwest
to the eastern border.
An exciting journey through nature
and time for the geologist.
He crosses the Tabernas Desert in Southern Spain
and reaches the shores of the Mediterranean.
North to the mouth of the Rhone.
Through the South of France, and Switzerland.
(wind howling)
Then, to the foothills of the Alps.
Passed rugged, towering mountains.
Followed by the extensive woodlands
of the low mountain ranges,
where winter arrives halfway through the route.
Along the Masurian Lake District in Poland.
It's only east from here.
An enormous stretch through the forests
of the Eastern European Plains.
After almost 7,000 kilometers,
Colin reaches Yekaterinburg.
The city is considered a border between Europe and Asia
and you can feel it on the streets.
(upbeat music)
A gigantic column just outside the city
is the final destination of Colin's journey.
Okay, I'll be honest with you,
I didn't walk all that way in one go.
Even if I seem to have been going for quite a long time.
At the end of the walk through
this beautiful forested plain, you come up on this column.
And this is really quite a rarity
because it's a geological monument
and there aren't many of them on this plant.
In the 1900s, the Czar sent out many
West European geologists in this region
looking for riches in the ground.
And amazingly, they found exactly
the same types of rocks here
as they knew from their homeland
thousands of kilometers away.
That is right up until this point
because here there's a fundamental change
in the way the earth is put together.
To commemorate that, they put up this monument in 1837.
Now a change like that, which is of continental size
is difficult to see from down here.
And to really appreciate it,
we need to get a bit more of an overview.
(helicopter whirring)
That's because the junction
from Europe to Asia is enormous.
(dramatic music)
The Ural Mountains, vast landscapes and snow-covered ridges.
Far up in the north, a mountain relief becomes recognizable.
It has a long history.
A look back into the past.
500 million years ago,
this part of the world is mostly ocean.
Siberia is an island.
The Ural Mountains are formed at the same time
as the low mountain ranges in Central Europe.
It's the seam between Russia and Siberia
and has been preserved to this day.
It's not particularly high,
but from North to South, it's almost 2,400 kilometers long.
Colin and his crew have been dropped off.
He's looking for a famous rock formation
situated in the middle of a high plateau
in the Northern Urals.
(dramatic music) (wind howling)
A bitter cold wind whistles
and meter deep snow slows progress.
But the goal is well worth the effort.
They're considered one of the Seven Wonders of Russia.
The rock columns of Manpupuner.
At 40 meters high, these sentinels
watch over the vast expanses of the Northern Urals.
The locals tell tales of the so-called seven strong men.
According to legend, they were once threatening giants
that were turned into stone.
The climate in this area is extreme and dangerous.
The weather's changing.
In just a few moments a raging blizzard arrives
and Colin Devey is right in the middle of it.
(wind howling)
Sudden weather changes are not unusual in late winter.
With effort, Colin manages to reach his goal
and finds protection in the slipstream
of the gigantic columns.
I read the Manpupuner stones in the Northern Urals
is one of the natural wonders of Russia,
and hardly surprising.
I'm on a plateau at about 800 meters high
and the real question I've got is,
how can stones like this survive
although the rest of the mountains have been removed?
Why are they so resistant to weathering?
Now the answers got to be in the rocks,
so let's have a look at the rocks.
Yeah, it's not surprising that
that's a pretty hard piece of rock.
It's composed almost entirely of quartz.
There's some mica in there as well and it's very compact.
Water and frost is not gonna be able to get into there.
That's probably the reason
why these columns are standing here.
I've no idea how long they have stood here.
It could be millions of years.
And they're a real silent witness
to the enormous mountain range that used to stand here.
(dramatic music)
There resilient stones
stand on the edge of the largest
contiguous primeval forest in Europe,
situated in the Komi Republic.
(wind howling)
Many large mammals live here,
most of which have become extremely rare in Central Europe.
Winter is a hard time for moose.
Although they seem impervious to the freezing temperatures.
Food is scarce, only tough bark
and a few old shoots.
It's hardly enough, and so the mighty animals
lose a considerable amount of weight.
Wolves are also at home here.
Now in winter, they have to roam
vast areas to catch prey.
(wolf howling)
Food is only available under a meter thick layer of snow.
The fox takes what he can find.
Winter is hard on these animals.
However, they have all developed strategies
to survive the cold in this extreme region,
a region that once knew vastly different conditions.
65 million years ago,
the temperatures are higher than today.
It's pleasantly warm in the swamp forests of the Urals.
It's at this time that the history
of the pillars of Manpupuner begins.
(birds chirping)
Change is imminent.
Flowering plants have been around for some time.
Now they are entering a lasting partnership.
Bees help pollinate and spread flowering plants
in exchange for pollen and nectar.
And the world is still dominated by old animal groups.
(bee buzzing)
(dinosaur cawing)
There are still many ancient plants in the forests.
Mosses, ferns, and gigantic conifers.
(relaxing music)
The forests are lush green all-year round,
with many slow-growing plants
that do not shed their leaves, an impenetrable thicket.
Hidden in there is a small rodent, multituberculata.
It shares many traits with modern mammals,
a differentiated set of teeth to process food.
Front paws for grasping.
Fur, and the ability to regulate body temperature.
Properties that will prove useful.
Radical changes are coming.
(meteor rumbling) (rodent squeaking)
And they're coming fast.
After a global catastrophe,
temperatures are falling worldwide.
The climate is changing rapidly.
Only those who adapt quickly to the new conditions
have a chance of survival.
Seed plants and mammals emerge from the crisis
stronger than before.
(rodent squeaking)
Both seem to have been made for bad times.
(dramatic music)
For many mammals, the forests of the Urals
are still a safe haven.
And these ancient columns still stand guard.
(wind howling)
Colin Devey has finished his expedition
to the stones of Manpupuner.
It's time to return home.
Yeah, we've seen lots of Europe already,
from the extreme northwest corner,
to here where Europe butts up against Asia.
It's a huge continent and there's lots to discover.
It's really worth taking the time
to go out and look in detail.
I have to go back to Germany tomorrow morning,
but I'm gonna spend a nice evening now
with my new Russian friends in front of the log fire
in this cozy wooden hotel over here.
See you next time.
(dramatic music)