Prehistoric Worlds | Earth Has Faced Apocalyptic Events Five Times | Documentary

earth a planet seemingly born to create life to nurture it to be shaped and colored by it and to shelter it [Music] and yet of all the organisms that have ever lived on earth 98.5% of gone extinct because our splendid sanctuary has been visited by the apocalypse five times in all everything we see on earth today is the end survivor of at least one or maybe more mass extinction events we are the descendants of those who survived extinction five times nearly every living thing was wiped off the face of the planet five hells of ice and fire devastation in the seas on land and in the air above [Music] after each mass extinctions there's always winners survivors that proliferate to become the rulers of the earth after each annihilation the handful of survivors gave rise to an explosion of life-forms the free mission you have to imagine organisms that are radically different to those of today with some extraordinary forms from the beautiful to the bizarre [Music] and with an arms race of predator and prey leading inevitably to giants these are the stories of Earth's lost worlds and the fantastic lives and fearsome deaths of its wondrous creatures [Music] at least three and a half billion years ago life got a toehold on a still hostile earth perhaps in a boiling volcanic pools somewhere on the planet microbes were born for all we know alone in the universe marvelous forms of life would evolve and colonize every corner of the planet in a precarious balancing act an equilibrium so fragile that a few degrees of change in the world's temperature could mean disaster and so it happened some 450 million years ago that the first great dying took place at the time during a period known as the Ordovician the continents clustered in the southern hemisphere thanks to temperatures just two degrees warmer than today's the ice caps were almost non-existent and the oceans some 600 metres higher than their current level it was a very different world to ours the continents were barren but in the seas after billions of years of simple microscopic life extraordinary creatures appeared the oceans played host to the first earthly paradise the life is boomin is blowing and going in the oceans for sure so in the Ordovician see you had animals like trilobites like little pill bugs probably bite you moving around they have eyes you have legs they have segmented body parts and they're cruising around on the seafloor eating organic matter or other smaller animals you also have corals not the same ones we have today but different kinds of corals and as a group of animals called the crinoids which we call sea lilies because they look like plants but they are in fact animals they have a place very attached to the seafloor they have a long stem and it looks like a flower but in fact is the body of the animal in this first evening at once familiar and strange the shallows teem with creatures going about their business like these fish some of the first creatures with bones and these conodonts which look like tiny eels but the continents paradise was not without truly terrifying hunters like the cephalopods ancestors to the octopus these are nasty marine predators if you are out swimming with one of those things it's not a pleasant concept be eaten by a squid I mean it's reversed calamari right calamari eat you for millions of years life proliferated and of waters around the continents but for reasons we still don't understand the ocean temperatures dropped by four degrees causing an abrupt and brutal Ice Age evaporated sea water that rained down on the land no longer flowed back to the sea it accumulated as ice as the ice grows the sea level goes down and so if you live in the shallow marine ecosystems and you have a freezing period which starts to move the water from the oceans onto land ice you decrease the area where animals can live and you can get extinctions [Music] after this first cold wave temperatures started to climb again the ice melted and sea levels rose these climate convulsions pounded the already weakened creatures that still clung to life and the one-two punch of cold and hot put in motion the first mass extinction in Earth's history [Music] by the end of the Ordovician 85% of species had been wiped out but a handful of Hardy survivors made it through including some of the primitive bony fish which would navigate a singular pathway through the Tree of Life one for which we should be eternally grateful [Music] it's descendants branched out to give rise to all the vertebrates that have ever existed without it no dinosaur would ever have walked the earth no bird would have taken wing and no mammals or reptiles would ever have emerged and there would be no humans telling the story of life after this first mass extinction and the ones to come life branched out into billions of different forms each family each group each species being part of a vast spreading tree there's always winners in the lottery of extinction and whatever those survivors are that's where the next radiation happens that's where the next evolutionary burst happens so if you want a simple way to think about extinctions on planet Earth is the survivors are the winners and their descendants are the ones that populate the next time period the desolation of a mass extinction sets the stage for an evolutionary renaissance within tens of millions of years of the Ordovician catastrophe the survivors had given rise to a new era the Devonian [Music] it was a completely new world full of new prey and new predators some quite astounding in the sea we call the age of fishes because now the fishes have evolved their diversifying and you get some whoppers and and one of the greatest fishes of all time this animal called Dunkleosteus Dunkleosteus is the super predator of the age of fish right at the top of the food chain it probably swam in a constant search for large enough meals even specimens of its own kind in the Natural History Museum in Paris a plaster cast of Dunkleosteus --is impressive jaw testifies to the killing power of this giant of the Devonian this is the well-honed weapon of a fearsome hunter paleontologists Gelle claim all studies pachyderms the large family to which Dunkleosteus belongs certainly manifested you like this animals part of the group called pachyderms which means that they have thick bony plates under their skin here we see the jaw with these sharp points which are not teeth because teeth didn't exist yet it's actually the jaw bone which presents this pincer for Middleton so it can crush and chop up the prey in which a defense department is gonna waste and while Dunkleosteus terrorized the Seas the continents were being transformed [Music] the beginning of it on land there little tiny things about the end there were forests devotee is when you get a land environment it starts to look like something you might recognize and go from nothing to forests but trees release water vapor into the air and may have triggered epic storms over the continents [Music] Torrence wept dead and decomposing plant matter into the oceans choking them oxygen levels plummeted global cooling and volcanic turbulence may have worsened the crisis in the seas as well for marine life sustenance grew scarce eventually the food chain collapsed the Devonian extensions strangled three-quarters of the world's marine life to death but on land the forest kept thriving any creature looking to survive the disaster at sea would have to seek greener pastures literally and that would require some anatomical innovation so you have a variety of fish it actually are maneuvering their way around in shallow water and they have these lobe like fins that actually if you look at the fossil zone they actually you can start to see the Rays the fins actually have distinct bones and it's this lineage of fish that eventually evolves into amphibians with the seas suffocating and the lush land beckoning the menu required updating pioneering fish like Tiktaalik a descendant of the bony fish that slipped through the first mass extinction had already been experimenting with life where the shallows meet the land it had gills to breathe in water but also a primitive lung for breathing air and for robust fins that would later become legs fleeing the choking oceans Tiktaalik and its family the sir copter Regine's crept out of the water and slithered through the second great extinction and the world would never be the same a new chapter in the history of life began and again in the race of life the winners give rise to new branches of the evolutionary tree [Music] in the new age of the Permian the first modern trees developed photosynthesis enriched the air with oxygen at the same time the continents drifted together to form a supercontinent Pangea a vast new territory for land going animals to explore and exploit animals unlike anything the world had ever seen before evolved to handle life on terra firma where conditions like temperature varied much more wildly and harshly than in the seas to protect their offspring big predators like the Gorgon opsins began to lay the first eggs with hard shells all the early land animals walked on four legs hence the name tetrapods a body plan that says revolutionary as any in the story of life and some were quite flamboyant what you've got our animals it looked like a big iguana with a great big sail on its back it's likely to these sales were poor either impressing the other sex or for moderating heat you can rotate towards the Sun and your blood is warmed up on this big warming surface or you can rotate away from the Sun you can cool it down [Music] these palooka sores with our iconic sails lived alongside Dyson aDOT's herbivores with a new innovation a beak designed to excavate the tough routes on which they fed these huge animals were probably hunted by the biggest predators in Pangaea like the Titanic Onias or Titanic killer a reptile that could grow to a length of 5 meters [Music] in the seas 100 million years after the collapse of the oceans vibrant new life escapes flourished you would have just loved scuba diving in the Permian and you got all these incredible creatures that are out swimming around is corals there's suppli pods the fishes has gotten big now and you've got your first sharks certainly one of the most amazing is this animal called helicoprion it basically had this whirl of teeth matter in its lower jaw and it would slam into its upper jaw and it was a slicing mechanism it swam around the sea and just chopped stuff in half and then came back and ate it the massive fossilized teeth from this buzzsaw shark suggest it could have grown to a length of 12 meters on land and in the water the biodiversity of the Permian was simply spectacular but it was doomed the most devastating natural catastrophe the earth has ever seen so far awaited them a cataclysm that would transform this paradise into hell on earth for millions of years some 250 million years ago in what is now Siberia the earth tried to turn itself inside out these vast cliffs called traps formed when the planet belts lava over and over again for tens of thousands of years Iceland one of the most volcanically active countries in the world is entirely built by lava flows it is an open-air laboratory for geologists like Patrick to waver and embedded in the rock he finds the barrels of a lava flows smoking guns when there is an emission of lava there are holes in the massive rock and these holes are filled with gases which come out at the same time as magma there are different types of gas there's water vapor there are sulfur oxides and carbon dioxide we know water vapor is greenhouse gas which tends to raise the temperature as does carbon dioxide but sulphur oxides have a double effect on the one hand they cause acid rain and they also partially block out sunlight leading to a drop in temperature and lower light levels which means a reduction in photosynthesis and so perhaps fewer plants and since animals feed on plants fewer plants mean herbivores start to die and then in turn the carnivorous animals die too the permian-triassic extinction was the mother of all extinctions basically a lot of our friends that have been with us for the entire Paleozoic things like trauma bites last trauma bite goes lots of these earlier marine organisms they've survived through much of the earlier extinctions sorry can't make it through on the other side of the world in China's Zhejiang Province researchers Silva Casca and Marie betrays pharrell her in search of one creature that survived the Permian disaster in the seas hoping to find the secrets of how to cheat extinction here at the dividing line between the abundant Permian and the disaster ravaged time just after the researchers locate what they're looking for tiny crustaceans called ostracods Sapolsky boy this was like on my album ostracods had an ability to adapt to some of the most stressed environments in the history of the planet in her Paris laboratory Sylvie puts her prizes under the microscope ostracods from before the disaster are pretty large for miniature marine life the ones from immediately after are not just easily conditioned what that extremists just after the crisis conditions were extremely harsh you can imagine that ostracods went into energy saving mode meaning they reduce the metabolism as far as possible to consume less energy which is why you find smaller ones which also had smaller eggs and with reproduction cycles that are much shorter than those usually observed in the Paleozoic soon if I don't nobody was Ricky after the devastation of the permian life hit the reset button once again on land the few tetrapods that survived descendants of the first land going vertebrates would evolve into reptiles dinosaurs and mammals [Music] millions of years later by the start of the Triassic the branches of the tree of life are once again blossoming [Music] the tri-c's time of tremendous innovation because the decks have been cleared so severely in the permian-triassic so you you basically wipe the slate not clean but pretty clean the triassic is this really crazy place where these things now radiate again into this all his different kinds of shapes and forms lots of really cool weird animals in the Triassic in the ocean marine reptiles had emerged like the ichthyosaurs which roamed the seas hunting fish and squid corals bloomed and built reefs once again ammonites proliferated along with sea urchins and starfish [Music] in the skies above the first flying reptiles called pterosaurs beat their huge wings on land great herbivores with tough leathery armor grazed in conifer forests their defensive carapace hints at the presence of fearsome predators like the agile Coelophysis which probably hunted in packs the two-legged 40-pound Coelophysis was one of the first dinosaurs to grace the earth it would take tens of millions of years and another global catastrophe before giant dinosaurs completely dominated the world [Music] some 200 million years ago Europe and Africa tore away from the American continent forming the Atlantic Ocean the earth entered a new period of volcanic upheaval it's set in motion the fourth mass extinction in the planets history wiping out three-quarters of land-dwelling species and 96% of ocean species then great Permian experiment lay in ruins but once again life would rise like a phoenix from the ashes the dinosaurs survived the mammals survived that were terrorists story survives there are land you have these lineages now that are often racing [Music] in the highlands of central south africa The Rock's preserver record of this Renaissance and a world dominated by some of the most massive animals that ever existed the mega dinosaurs paleontologist Jonah's choise near and his students from Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg are excavating fossils from the Triassic and Jurassic periods that may shed light on this revolutionary transition [Music] while his students extract a fossil from the Triassic Jonah goes in search of sediments from the Jurassic these rocks in this cliff these are Jurassic so there are about 200 million years old down below us and the Triassic all types of animals are found in the rocks but as we come up into the Jurassic dinosaurs become much more common in fact almost everything we find here is a dinosaur immediately after the extinction event dinosaurs are small but just for a short time suddenly they explode into enormous body sizes and in fact within a few million years you have things that are twice the size of today's elephants [Music] in the triassic it's anyone's game but as soon as we get into the Jurassic it's clear that dinosaurs are the winners of the day [Music] hi guys hey wow you flipped it fantastic okay we've taken bigger ones down before okay are you ready on three two three most of the fossils collected in South Africa in the past century are housed at West water strand University in Johannesburg the wealth of this collection underlines the sheer variety of species during the Jurassic [Music] the fossils on these shells are the bones of Ladue mihari mihari a giant dinosaur from South Africa which lived in the Jurassic period about 200 million years ago and this is the foot bone of LeDoux mihari mihari this is the only known specimen of LeDoux Mahadi and we've been looking in South Africa for well over 150 years for dinosaurs the name LeDoux Mahadi means a giant thunderclap and Mehboob a which is the species name means dawn so together it's a suit to term meaning a giant thunderclap at dawn we can tell from these bones that this animal weighed about 12 tons and that's amazing because it shows that dinosaurs soon after the end Triassic extinction we're able to rebound and attain enormous sizes we can tell from the bones of the duma hottie that it must have walked on all four legs in fact much like a modern elephant but with a slightly more crouched limb posture this type of dinosaur is a sauropod a morph and we know that they had long necks and tiny heads and giant bodies where they would have fermented the food they swallowed whole dinosaurs like ladoo mihari would have made tremendous advantage of the openings in the environment to the ecosystems left vacant by the entry assic extinction after life was almost wiped out in the Permian fascinating new creatures emerged on the stage with the arrival of flowering plants and pollinating insects evolution went into overdrive the development of new species spark the genesis of others herbivores grew larger and more diversified along with the carnivores that fed on these gigantic sauropods were the biggest land animals that have ever lived some of them as much as 100 feet long 20 feet tall up to 88 tons these massive incredible animals [Music] during the Cretaceous evolution went to extremes the jaw of the t-rex exerted so much force it could crush the bones of its prey and swallow them whole the largest flying creatures the earth has ever seen ruled two skies pterosaurs whose wingspan could reach 12 meters [Music] and in the oceans creatures also grew immense like Plesiosaurus a ferocious predator and then there was the Moses or a reptile that grew up to 18 meters the dinosaurs dominated the face of the earth for more than 175 million years covering two geological periods the Jurassic then the Cretaceous today they're only descendants are birds once again a cataclysm shook the planet and brought the giant slow as the Cretaceous drew to its close the world began to resemble the one we know but India which was not yet joined to the Asian continent underwent a massive volcanic episode like the one in Siberia that ended the Permian the Deccan Traps bear witness to eruptions that occurred over several millennia they date from some 65 million years ago around the time that the dinosaurs disappeared until the 1980s many scientists attributed the dinosaurs extinction to this volcanic outburst then came a theory that was out of this world literally that the dinosaur killer was an extraterrestrial in 1980 this crazy idea was proposed that an asteroid hit the planet and caused the extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs and we all thought that's nuts it's like National Enquirer science little green men come take our dinosaurs asteroid strikes give me a break so everybody last thought this is a joke a joke that scientists would be forced to take seriously in the Badlands of Western Canada paleontologist Francoise Chavan from the Royal Tyrrell Museum makes his way down through millions of years of fossil rich sediments this valley carved out by the Red Deer River has yielded thousands of dinosaur skeletons and one layer of sediment bears the reddish signature of a dinosaur killer so you can see here this salmon colored rock here this line marks the end of the age of the dinosaurs and the beginning of the age of mammals for geologists and paleontologists this line here represents a record of a catastrophic event a meteorite impact that occurred 66 million years ago at the base of the layer we have the last pollens of the last plants that grew at the end of the Cretaceous followed by I iridium which is an element extremely rare at the surface of the earth but extremely abundant in meteorites this line here marks the extinction of the dinosaurs and still at the end of the 20th century not all researchers accepted the theory of an extraterrestrial impact it would have left a massive scar somewhere on earth so where was the crater scientists began looking for analyzing and dating each major crater they could find but none coincided with the extinction of the dinosaurs in the end it was to geologists from an oil company who discovered it by chance nestled in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula half hidden by the waters off the coast lay a crater more than a hundred miles across it was 66 million years old and the horrors of the most famous extinction of all could no longer be denied if you were on planet Earth 66 point oh two million years ago walking around in a beautiful forest price their tops is grazing next to you you're worried you might run into at rhinoceros Rex but you don't see one right now life is good these are flowering suddenly in an instant a blinding light and you're dead the asteroid impact was an amazing thing because unlike all the other extinctions that preceded it this one was global an instant it took a second or two for the asteroid to pass through the atmosphere on the way in the asteroid of course is gone it's vaporized it's now molten rock shattered target rock all that stuff blows back out through the hole the atmosphere into low Earth orbit the Earth rotates underneath it and then all that debris starts to rain back into the atmosphere as it rains back in and heats up and the sky gets hot the heat from the sky makes it to the ground and starts fires so no matter where you are on earth within hours you are feeling some serious hurt if you're anywhere in North America forget about the initial explosion takes care of you there's smoke there's dust blocks out the sunlight if your plant there's no photosynthesis if you were a big animal if you survive the initial blast somewhere in earth there's probably nothing to eat you probably don't make it to the first winter magnitude 13 earthquake a gigantic tsunami the raining blocks of rock that are flown for hundreds of miles and the oceans have taken a great insult as well the chemists of the oceans have changed the phytoplankton were turned off for months the so plankton have then crashed the marine food system is down in total three quarters of species vanished forever all the big dinosaurs were wiped off the map [Music] but while the Titans died the stage was set for some tiny survivors to take over the world [Music] the Royal Tyrrell Museum is home to one of the world's largest dinosaur collections including a specimen of the most terrifying of all Tyrannosaurus Rex but here scientists are also resurrecting the little animals that would inherit the earth Craig's got head of conservation and research studies the mammals of the Paleocene the time just after the fifth extinction I'm essentially a paleo dentist because the vast majority of specimens that I examine are our teeth the fossil record of mammals is largely a dental record you do get the occasional jaws and sometimes you get some post cranial remains as well but for mammals of this age and older the record is primarily dental well from looking at these teeth I can tell from the shapes of the cusps that this animal was probably eating some resistant foods may be really hard insects or it might have even been crushing mollusks so the shells of snails and clams and I can also tell by looking at the teeth that they have a very good resemblance to living relatives of hedgehogs and shrews [Music] those mammals that survived the fifth mass extinction were no larger than a rat but the fossils that Craig Scott is analyzing illustrates the speed with which they evolved diversified and became giants exploiting the ecological niches once monopolized by the dinosaurs so this is the skull of an animal called a panted aunt and panted ants were large almost hippopotamus like herbivores that live during the peléan in the Eocene they represent the group of mammals that achieve the largest body size during the Paleocene and some of these animals made it up to the size of a very large cow so within 15 million years or 20 million years after the extinction event mammals went from animals that had an average body size of maybe a small rabbit up to something that's similar to living hippopotamuses so that's quite quite a leap and a mere 10 million or so years after that mammals got even larger and they achieved body sizes equivalent to living elephants and rhinoceroses [Music] the great extinction events were revolutions in the story of life because the thread of life never completely snapped and five times cataclysms opened up new worlds to the survivors after each new branches on the tree of life would bloom and fill the void left by the dead [Music] and across the earth that little shrew like animal multiplied transformed and became all the fantastic mammals we know today [Music] some even returned to the seas [Music] they evolve into unique forms and adapted to every climate every environment [Music] side-by-side with other survivors they created a world as colorful and diverse as any that had gone before this is the sixth earthly paradise and it is uniquely ours because one among this mammalian multitude a species of primate rose up on its hind legs to dominate and remake the earth like no other species before it some lineages were important in times past and disappeared because they didn't survive extinctions but what we have today is this composite world humans and trees and whales of fish and birds and primates you can go back in their individual lineages and find out when they're lucky moment was when did their ancestor survive key extinctions when was their point when their ancestors radiated and diversified and we're all survivors at this point in time human beings now study the forces of nature that propelled them to dominance a Restless earth with a volatile and vulnerable climate an equilibrium we know to be alarmingly fragile supporting a complex web of life all on a home where death could come from the skies in an instant but the next mass extinction may already be upon us and for the first time it may be more akin to mass suicide previous crises have all had a natural cause and were either caused by a volcanic eruptions meteorite impacts or climate change the difference with this crisis is its 100% caused by humans as such is happening at a much faster rate and is far less predictable right around every extinction we've seen one or a couple of species surges and dominance and that's what we're seeing today with humanity taking off at the expense of other animals on the planet [Music] the time scale that we're talking about now for the current crisis is incredibly incredibly fast much much faster than anything that we've experienced before mankind is destroying its own planet at a phenomenal rate even at our human scale we can see species becoming extinct whatever happens life would regenerate on earth and it will only take a few million years but what the actors will be in that new play that plays out over the future of life on this planet it's anyone's guess on the unimaginable timescale of our planet's evolution we now know that history repeats itself and the lesson of that history is clear when catastrophe strikes molten frozen or hell from the heavens the creatures that dominate will likely vanish but the earth itself will not and life will always find a way [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Potato Philips

Views: 235,264

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Id: bzUa28bMaVY

Length: 52min 49sec (3169 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 23 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Temetnoscecubed]

That's why I'm not worried about the current extinction event. I will act like a crocodile turtle shark and make it to the new world.

[u/JustinZ]

The story of Death Stranding