Evolutionary consequences of continental isolation

The story of Australia is the story of endless change: life, climate, and location. Seas come and go. Mountains rise and fall. Whole kingdoms of life triumph and disappear. The series final sees us racing down the last 65 million years to the present day. A mere blip in the long geological story of Australia but importantly for us, it is in this episode that we reveal the events that have shaped the more obvious features of the continent we now inhabit. In the wake of the catastrophe that saw off the dinosaurs, Australia set off on a lonely voyage in southern seas.

After navigating the perils at the end of the Permian, our journey spends tonight's episode of in the Mesozoic just in time for the Age of Dinosaurs, Down Under. Things get off to a shaky start though with the planet left so devastated that the landscape where Sydney now stands was a sandy wasteland. Until recently, nearly everything we've known about the Age of Dinosaurs has come from other continents.

Great waves of biological invasion sweep us into episode two of Australia: The Time Traveller's Guide. The oceans, replete from the explosion of life that began in the Cambrian, are now spilling their cargoes onto the land. Australia, now part of the super-continent Gondwana is truly a wide, brown land and has had no blush of life on land to blemish its barren surface.