Monsters We Met

Narrator:
[about Megalania] Megalania six metres long the largest lizard ever to have lived. Its saliva is riddled with toxic bacteria, a bite from this creature spell certain death. It is short sighted but it has another method for detecting prey. Like the Komodo dragon it tastes the air with its forked tongue using an acute sense of smell to track down food from as far as fifteen kilometers away.

[first lines]

Narrator:
A journey back in time, no human eye has ever seen this land or the extraordinary creatures that roam here. When the first people reach this continent in prehistory they found an immense wilderness ravaged by drought and scorched by fire. This is a land where human survival will be tested to the very limits. Imagine what life will be like for these first Australians. In this harsh strange world, human ingenuity will be pitched against predators which are a throwback to the age of the dinosaurs.

Narrator:
[about Haast's Eagle] The Maori soon discover their new found world is far larger than any islands their people have previously occupied. In fact New Zealand is a bigger landmass than all the Polynesian islands put together. Exploring the heavily forested interior it will not be long before they discover the islands top predator, a creature that will come to strike fear in the hearts of the Maori. The Haast eagle the largest and most deadly aerial predator the world has ever seen. It has a three meter wingspan, talons the size of tiger's claws that will crush the neck of a giant moa, a bird twenty times its weight. This is a specialist in crippling two-legged prey. When it first sets eyes on humans this pre-adapted man killer sees fare game. It swoops down on unsuspecting victims at speeds up to eighty kilometers per hour. This monstrous raptor remains by its kill for days. The Maori will speak of this giant carrying people away to feed its ravenous young.

Narrator:
[Last lines, about the Polynesians of Easter Island] Easter Island the remotest scrap of land on Earth, lost in the Pacific Ocean. Here proud monoliths lie in neglect abandoned by a Polynesian society in ruins. The forests felled the birds gone the soil eroded by farming and the wind. When the Polynesian arrived here in four hundred AD the island was covered in dense forest steadily was cleared to plant great gardens build canoes and erect these magnificent statues. Within a thousand years a culture that created the only written Polynesian language vanished collapsing into warfare cannibalism and environmental ruin. Here is the paradox of humans we are capable of such heroic and triumphant creations and yet we are also highly capable of perpetrating such horror on the rest of the natural world.

Narrator:
And so it is that the mammoth is not part of our world. Or the sabre-toothed cat, and the giant American Lions. They are now only ghosts. But are we at all haunted by their loss?

Narrator:
[about the Haast's Eagle hunting Maori settlers] For many thousands of years, its regular prey has been the giant flightless birds. But now, the eagle's eye has been caught by something different. It is big enough, it is walking upright on two legs, it is food.

Narrator:
[Opening Lines] A land discovered thousands of years before Columbus. This is the first people have come face to face with the monstrous animals which roamed the continent of North America.

Narrator:
[about the Short-Faced Bear] A slain mammoth can provide enough food to satisfy hungry stomachs for weeks but it is always risky to return to the kill. It is a magnet for the most fearsome predator. The short faced bear, the largest and most intimidating predator that has ever hunted on land. It is an astoundingly efficient killer capable of running at speeds in excess of sixty kilometers per hour.

Narrator:
[about Smilodon] The saber-tooth, larger and more ferocious than any lion is armed with seven inch daggers designed for puncturing flesh and severing arteries. They are ambush specialists which disembowel and bleed their victims to death. They are lucky, the saber-tooth has never seen an animal with fire in its hands but these people will always have to be on their guard. There are other monsters they are yet to meet. The saber-tooth is the least of their worries.

[last Lines]

Narrator:
The smoking gun is in our hands, somewhere in our battle for survival we acquired the power to cause extinction!

Narrator:
[First Lines] A mammoth, on the middle of a modern-day city. A creature out of place, out of time. Mammoths aren't part of our world, but we were once part of theirs.

Narrator:
[Last Lines] The smoking gun is in our hands, somewhere in our battle for survival we acquired the power to cause extinction!