Attenborough and the Sea Dragon review: a fun detective story starring the great nonagenarian
David Attenborough has always been a prehistory fan. In a documentary I can carbon-date to 1984, he forensically pieced together the story of the pterodactyl via its avian descendants. There was a similar piece of reverse engineering to Attenborough and the Sea Dragon (BBC One), in which the physiology of an ichthyosaurus was elucidated by comparing it to sharks and crocs and dolphins.
But this was also the story of an actual dig. Crikey, it looks like hard work being palaeontologist Chris Moore. It took much heavy hammering on a Dorset sea cliff to liberate the slabs of limestone rock containing the sea dragon’s fossils, and then almost a year to chip away at those stones to expose, like Michelangelo with his chisel, the creature lurking within.
Every so often, Attenborough popped down to Moore’s hut in Lyme Regis for a check-up, not knowing what path the story would take. When evidence of deadly injuries were found, including decapitation, we were suddenly plunged into a prehistoric murder mystery. Attenborough turned sleuth to explore the brutal physique of the prime suspect, the sleekly terrifying temnodontosaurus.
In this detective story, you found out all sorts of unexpected things thanks to the limitless cleverness of university scientists and their amazing gizmos. Talk about niche – in Portsmouth they’ve even got a pathologist who investigates causes of death in prehistoric creatures. It was particular fun to see a vast fossil X-rayed at the Royal Veterinary College, the only place with a large enough machine for the job.
One sequence involving leatherback turtles was cost-savingly shot on the same Caribbean beach featured in Blue Planet II. But make no mistake, Attenborough the prehistorian presenter is slightly different from the biologist who explains living species. He asked many more questions and, as he chopped open a pebble to expose a perfect ammonite fossil, gave way to schoolboyish giggles.
The great nonagenarian showed his age only once. “So this was the king of the Jurassic sea?” he asked Emily Rayfield of Bristol University. “Or queen,” she replied. The Attenboroughsaurus can be carbon-dated to the Jurassic era of gender politics.
