Walking with Prehistoric Beasts, "Whale Killer"

Around 410 million years ago (the Silurian period), the first sea creatures were beginning make forays onto the land. The first group to successfully do so were the scorpions. For some time, they had been successful predators in the sea, with only the squid's ancestors threatening them. But then, some swarmed onto land, while others grew so large (3 meters or more in length) in the sea that they had no natural enemies. This was Scorpion World, where huge shoals of trilobites were food and fish had to be heavily armoured to escape giant claws. We follow the perilous journey of a shoal of Alaspis, our distant fishy ancestors, as they attempt to migrate from the sea to a lake to spawn. At the end, we see an Alaspis morph and transform, growing in size and stature until it becomes Acanthostega, a Devonian amphibian.

AmazonUnbox | November 22, 2001

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