1999 Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) Episode 4: The Giant of the Skies 🦕

Walking with Dinosaurs is a 1999 six-part nature documentary television miniseries created by Tim Haines and produced by the BBC Science Unit, the Discovery Channel and BBC Worldwide, in association with TV Asahi, ProSieben and France 3. Envisioned as the first "Natural History of Dinosaurs", Walking with Dinosaurs depicts dinosaurs and other Mesozoic animals as living animals in the style of a traditional nature documentary. The series first aired on the BBC in the United Kingdom in 1999 with narration by Kenneth Branagh. <br /><br />Giant of the Skies - Giant of the Skies is the fourth episode of Walking with Dinosaurs. The episode begins with a male Ornithocheirus dead on a beach. Six months earlier, the Ornithocheirus, resting among a colony of breeding Tapejaras in Brazil, flies off for Cantabria where it too must mate. He flies past a migrating group of the iguanodont Dakotadon and the nodosaur Polacanthus (American Polacanthus identified as Gastonia in American version). He reaches the southern tip of North America, where he is forced to shelter from a storm. He grooms himself, expelling his body of Saurophthirus fleas; the crest on his jaw begins to change color in preparation for the mating season. He then sets off across the Atlantic, which was then only 300 kilometers wide, and after a whole day on the wing, reaches the westernmost of the European islands. He does not rest there however, as a pack of Utahraptors are hunting Iguanodon; a young Utahraptor is bullied off an Iguanodon carcass by the adults. The Ornithocheirus flies to the outskirts of a forest to rest after stealing a fish from another pterosaur, but is driven away by Iberomesornis. Flying on, he reaches Cantabria, but due to the delays, exhaustion, and old age he cannot reach the center of the many grounded male Ornithocheirus and consequently he does not mate. After several days under the sun trying to attract a mate, the protagonist Ornithocheirus dies from heat exhaustion and starvation. The same fate befalls others who had lost out in the attempt to attract a mate. The next generation of Ornithocheirus feeds on their corpses.