Sense of Drama… David Attenborough looks at the fossilized skin of triceps. Photo: Jon Sayer / BBC Studios We do not know exactly when the asteroid struck. But within 40 minutes, the effects 2,000 miles away on Tanis – the name given to the Dakotan beach by paleontologists who have been digging there for a decade – were profound. Dinosaurs: The Final Day With David Attenborough (BBC One) plays those scary last minutes as fires, earthquakes, tsunamis and seismic waves devastated the globe and all life on the Tanis was quickly buried in sediment. For context, that was 60 million years before we got up (or rather get up). And we see in real time how this is done. This is just the last half hour of Dinosaurs: The Final Day. And it is a worrying prognosis for something that happened 66 million years ago. I found myself wandering around like the Norwegian fjords mysteriously in 2011 after an earthquake struck Japan, while watching this brilliant, fascinating and elegiac feature-length documentary. From the miserable despair about our modern role in this story, the deep awe for our ability to discover its deep mysteries. The Attenborough signature cocktail of emotions, then. One of the written notes simply says to me: “We are the asteroid”. Dinosaurs: The Final Day skillfully uses state-of-the-art FX and a virtual production studio, which I do not understand more than the eye of a Sauron-like Oxfordshire synchronist, where lead paleontologist Robert DePalma takes his astonishing findings for scanning. The point is to take us back to the late Cretaceous, so we can see for ourselves what the last days of the dinosaurs could have been like. And what Attenborough would look like (much like a fish in water, of course) when our cute furry ancestors smelled his chino. Things that are on the edge of the seat for some, but for me FX virtual documentaries in nature / science tend to frustrate fake flowers: never as shocking as the real ones. A hint of Indiana Jones παλαι paleontologist Robert DePalma at Tanis in North Dakota. Photo: Ali Pares / BBC Studios Most exciting is the excavation at Hell Creek Formation. Here, DePalma and his team excavate a massive dinosaur graveyard buried in a layer of crushed rock. Fortunately, DePalma has Indiana Jones magnetism levels and can dig a good line with as much order as he can handle his trowel (and Fedora). “It’s like trying to defuse a nuclear weapon while you’re in a storm,” he plans, brushing the mattress of mass death. While “performing surgery on a Cretaceous fish”, he discovers tiny balls of molten rock in the gills of the fish. These are ejected balls launched into the atmosphere by the asteroid, which “saw the light of day for the last time when they flew in the air 66 million years ago.” In an amber knot, he finds spheres containing a perfectly preserved particle “of the sphere that killed the dinosaurs.” The asteroid itself. Wow. In another exciting time in this long-running detective story, the team reveals what has never been found before: the body of a dinosaur killed by the effects of an asteroid impact. “I think we got a dinosaur!” DePalma cries as they dig a block of sediment that, to me, looks like any other block of sediment. Hours later, the fossilized foot of a treasure trove, including skin and tissue, emerges, resembling a “Thanksgiving turkey.” The position of the foot, entangled in the “jam” of Tanis’s mass death mattress, where they found the amber and the bullets with meteorite spots, is proof enough. The dinosaur died as a result of the asteroid collision. After that catastrophic day on Earth, the sulfur fired by the asteroid blocked all sunlight. The planet has been in the dark for a decade. Temperatures dropped dramatically. On land, the plants died and in the seas the plankton disappeared. Three-quarters of all species have disappeared. “Then,” says Attenborough, “something wonderful came.” Plant life returned, and with it, some of the smallest and most versatile creatures, including our little furry ancestors who had survived the nuclear winter in their burrows. And Attenborough did not give up. “We are unique in our ability to learn from the distant past,” he concludes. “We must now use this ability prudently… to protect the millions of species for which, with us, this planet is home.”
