Australia - The time travellers Guide ** merge into 260762 **

Of all continents on Earth, none preserve the story of the formation of our planet and the evolution of life quite like Australia. Nowhere else can you simply jump in a car and travel back through the entire history of the world. Australia: The Time Traveller's Guide is the untold story of the land Down Under, the one island continent that has got it all. It's the ultimate outback road trip: an exploration of the history of the planet as seen through the mind-altering window of the Australian continent. In this first episode, Dr Richard Smith guides us through the early years of the Earth's formation, from the Hadean period onwards

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, now spill their cargo onto the land. Australia, part of the super-continent Gondwana is truly a wide, brown land with no blush of life to blemish its barren surface. As Dr. Richard Smith discovers, that all changed in the Silurian, as planet Earth's forgotten pioneers - plants -invade the shores. Arthropod armies soon follow. Then, the rise and rise of fish and the emergence of four-legged animals onto the land. Once again, prehistoric life was busy bankrolling our modern economy and building the basic elements that we know and love as the Australia of today.

After navigating the extinction perils at the end of the Permian, the third episode in this series finds us 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. But Australia languishes as a Mesozoic backwater no longer. New discoveries are revealing a southern landscape ruled with a reptilian rod: dinosaurs stomped in the west, stampeded in the east and shivered in the south. Some were among the largest dinosaurs to have walked the planet.

Dr Richard Smith embarks on the final stage of his rollicking adventure through the geological history of Australia. From the formation of its landscape to the development of its wildlife in today's desert heart, we plunge into an ancient inland sea, full of monsters. But reptiles didn't have the world all to themselves. Mammals like the enigmatic platypus lived alongside them, ready for their moment in the sun.