National Geographic: Adventures in Time

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Time...

That relentless force that transports us

from what was to what will be.

Though no one can say exactly

what time is

we do know what time it is.

For Millennium, this is a landmark

a special moment in time.

But far from all the commotion

millions of others count their years

very differently.

For Buddhists

the year 2000 came and went more

than five hundred years ago.

In the Muslim world

it was only the year 1420.

While for many Jews

it's the year the date was 5760.

Nevertheless the observance

of this year 2000

is a singular opportunity...

to listen to the heartbeat

of the planet.

The National Geographic Society has long

been capturing time:

making it stop, slowing it down,

and speeding it up...

All to better comprehend the relentless

flow from what was to what will be.

We invite you now to see the world

through our eyes

as we explore the epic adventure of life

through time.

For Time is the measure of our universe...

and only over time can we understand

the natural world.

And it is our unique grasp of Time

that helped give rise to science

and culture... to civilization itself.

Take time, add exploration and

the quest for knowledge

and you have the human story.

A story of constant

and accelerating change.

But now perhaps

we are at a most critical point

on the verge of controlling nature

and on the brink of destroying it.

What kind of world will we leave

to our children?

Only Time will tell.

In a single, ferocious instant

an explosion of heat and light

Time, as we know it, began.

It was the big bang.

Some thirteen billion years later

the cosmos defines our sense of wonder...

strewn with things unimaginable

like black holes

and towering nebulae trillions

of miles high spawning countless stars.

About two-thirds of the way through

the history of time

our own solar system was born.

A handful of planets

and assorted debris orbiting

an unremarkable star.

In this immense universe

our own planet is like an insignificant

blue ornament tenuously protected

by a paper thin atmosphere.

But a closer look reveals that there's

something wonderful going on here

something rare perhaps or even unique.

Something called Life.

To see the origin of life

we need only look beneath the waves.

Here, hundreds of millions of years ago

the sea was a living soup

of tiny organisms.

In this vast incubator life slowly

evolved from the simple to the complex.

Then, about 540 million years ago

there was an explosion of innovation.

Quite suddenly, entirely new forms

of life began to emerge.

In the millions of years

that followed armor plate

and prickly spines appeared to protect

creatures from a new threat:

predators.

In time, deadly jaws appeared...

and sinewy creatures who

muscled their way into the arms race.

Some animals have changed very little

over millions of years.

Among these living fossils are sharks:

part time machine, part killing machine.

We still are trying to understand

the elusive ways of

these remarkably well-adapted predators.

On the windswept Farallon Islands

off the coast of California

researchers have spent years following

the hunting patterns

of individual great white sharks.

...this bite looks like it could

be a seal or a sea lion, you know...

"Over seven years up to forty great

whites have been identified.

Some are observed in one season

and then never seen again.

While others come back every year.

One of these is a massive eighteen-foot

female named Stumpy -

so called because the tip

of her tail fin is missing."

"We don't know where Stumpy is during

most of the year,

but we do know that she shows up here

every Autumn at the Farallons."

...so pretty consistent.

She's almost always in the same area."

"What's more she appears to come

each year to the same spot to hunt.

How do you know Stumpy is here?

You set the board out...

and she lets you know...

This is how a great white kills

an elephant seal in the first hit...

In one precise torpedo-like blow

the shark hits the prey from below.

The stunning impact of the first lightning

strike may incapacitate the seal.

This strategy saves energy

and may minimize the rise

of injury to the shark."

This surprising sequence of attack

retreat and feast has served

the shark well for a very long time.

But Nature was not content to have

only the seas populated with living things.

After hundreds of millions of years

of preparation out of the water crept life.

It took countless generations for gills

to become lungs

and flippers to evolve into wings or feet.

Eventually, a profusion of crawling

flying and running creatures claimed

the land for their own.

Reptiles began a one hundred

and fifty million year

sovereignty over the planet.

It was the age of the dinosaurs.

They were the biggest creatures ever

to walk the earth.

Gone now some 65 million years...

they live on in our collective

imagination.

Among the departed was one of

the strangest dinosaurs that ever lived.

It was called Ovirapto

and it was swift, smart and lethal.

This expedition is traveling

to a remote part of Mongolia

to uncover the secrets

of the Oviraptor's world.

Michael Novacek and Mark Norell of the

American Museum of Natural History

come to this desolate place to piece

together a puzzle

of evolution and extinction.

"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven

eight, nine..."

"...and then three over there... twelve.

Twelve eggs... All right."

You know this is really a great

fossil find

because it's one of the rare instances

where we can capture a little bit

of behavior

that's 80 million years old.

Here we have a- a sort of a day

in the life or

or the death of a- of a creature

of a dinosaur

in association with something

it did during its life.

This one was fossilized where it dropped

and it happened to drop right on top

of its own nest.

"She didn't just drop there.

The good mother oviraptor was sitting

on the nest.

They probably brought food

to their nest as birds do.

And the good mother tended her eggs.

Like a bird,

she prodded them into a circle.

The fearsome carnivore

of the Gobi was parenting."

Then, with remarkable swiftness the age

of dinosaurs was over.

What happened exactly remains a mystery.

Many scientists believe an asteroid

perhaps six miles wide slammed into Earth

and helped snuff out the masters

of the world.

"From our perspective, of course,

this mass extinction event

is not a big problem

because we're part

of the group that survived...

and started evolving into bats and

and large hoofed animals

and lions and tigers and bears."

With the great reptiles gone, smaller

but more adaptable creatures took over.

Each learned to succeed in its own way.

Some rely on speed and powerful jaws.

Others, strength and a thick skin.

But no matter how adaptable a species

may be - in the savage struggle

between life and death,

there is but one simple rule:

Those who survive pass their traits

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