Melvirn: Why is one group a hyper diverse and why is one group potentially on the brink of extint ilis to for me, there's three things i'll just quickly highlight that get me really excited. The only thing we can think about with that mass extinction is that crocks do fairly well across that boundary. Dinosaus are almost entirely wiped out, with just some birds. Even most birds when extinct to that mass extinction. But to day, we have 25 species of crocx and something like 11 thousand species of birds. So really try to understand why those those of the two closest living representatives of that long sort of radiation of crocks and dinosaus.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the remarkable diversity of the animals that dominated life on land in the Triassic, before the rise of the dinosaurs in the Jurassic, and whose descendants are often described wrongly as 'living fossils'. For tens of millions of years, the ancestors of alligators and Nile crocodiles included some as large as a bus, some running on two legs like a T Rex and some that lived like whales. They survived and rebounded from a series of extinction events but, while the range of habitats of the dinosaur descendants such as birds covers much of the globe, those of the crocodiles have contracted, even if the animals themselves continue to evolve today as quickly as they ever have.
With
Anjali Goswami
Research Leader in Life Sciences and Dean of Postgraduate Education at the Natural History Museum
Philip Mannion
Lecturer in the Department of Earth Sciences at University College London
And
Steve Brusatte
Professor of Palaeontology and Evolution at the University of Edinburgh
Producer Simon Tillotson