Australia: The Time Traveller's Guide - Episode 2 (ATOM Study Guide)

Series synopsis

Of all continents on earth, none preserve the story of the formation of our planet and the evolution of life quite like Australia. Nowhere else can you simply jump in a car and travel back through the entire history of the world.

Australia: The Time Traveller's Guide takes you on a rollicking adventure from the birth of the earth to the emergence of the world we know today. Buckle up for a rocky ride down the road of time with series host Dr Richard Smith. Over four one-hour episodes, we meet titanic dinosaurs and giant kangaroos, sea monsters and prehistoric crustaceans, disappearing mountains and exploding asteroids. Epic in scope and intimate in nature, this is the untold story of the land down under, the one island continent that has got it all. So join the good doctor for the ultimate outback road trip: an exploration of the history of the planet as seen through the mind-altering window of the Australian continent.

This series consists of four one-hour episodes telling the story of our evolving earth through a geologist visiting important geological sites of Australia.

Curriculum and educational suitability:

• Science
• Geography
• Environment

Episode 2 Synopsis

Adventure deeper into prehistoric Australia as the conquest of the land begins.

In this, the second episode of the four-part series Australia: The Time Traveller's Guide, which tells the story of our evolving Earth through a geologist visiting important geological sites of Australia, we experience great waves of biological invasion. The oceans, replete with the explosion of life that began in the Cambrian, are now spilling their cargoes onto the beach. Australia, joined as part of the super-continent Gondwana, is truly a wide brown land with no blush of life to blemish its barren surface. All that changed in the Silurian, as host Richard Smith discovers. Prepare to meet planet Earth's forgotten pioneers: first the Arthropod armies that invaded the shores, and then the first green revolutionaries whose race for the light pushed plant life across the face of a sun-baked world. We follow the rise and rise of fish and the emergence of the four-legged animals that walked out into the garden wonderland now festooning the dry land. It was during this long greening of Gondwana that the eastern third of the continent was finally put in place, complete with the swampy forests and peatlands that would form Australia's vast coal reserves. Once again, prehistoric life was busy bankrolling our modern economy and building the Australia we know and love today.