DINO-MITE!

SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH on how technology has helped him follow in the footsteps of dinosaurs

- STEVEN PERKINS

DINOSAURS: THE FINAL DAY

NEW GOOD FRIDAY, 6.30 PM, BBC1 DOCUMENTARY

Sir David Attenborough is embarking on another roarsome adventure this week as he goes back in time to the end of the Cretaceous period for a new BBC1 documentary, Dinosaurs: The Final Day.

The landmark 90-minute special follows the groundbreaking work of palaeontologist Robert DePalma, whose excavations in a prehistoric graveyard called Tanis, in the Hell Creek Formation of North Dakota, have revealed fossils shedding new light on the extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

Here, Sir David, 95, tells us more...

What's the idea behind the new documentary?

It is about the last day the dinosaurs lived on Earth and the minute-by-minute detail of that day.

We tend to think the end of a (geological] period extends over decades, if not centuries, but this was one astonishingly huge event that was worldwide - an asteroid the size of Mount Everest hit the Earth. It caused the end of the dinosaurs, and life on this planet had to restart.

Why is the Tanis archaeological site of particular interest?

Robert DePalma has been excavating there for 10 years. When you excavate a site like that, you're looking for what the landscape was like - there were sandy banks between a river system and a forest, and what made him think it was strange was that he found ammonites, which are sea creatures. This is a freshwater site, so why were they there?