Walking with Prehistoric Beasts (TV Mini Series)

Whale Killer (2001)

Kenneth Branagh: Narrator

Quotes 

• Kenneth Branagh : [talking about a mass extinction that is going to occur]  Twenty percent of living things on Earth will die out. Whales as a group will survive, but Basilosaurus and her kind will not be among them.

• Kenneth Branagh : Every whale, is a killer.

• Kenneth Branagh : [talking about the masses of mangrove swamps]  Believe it or not, you are looking at what will become the driest areas on the planet. The Sahara desert!

• [first lines] 

  Kenneth Branagh : When the dinosaurs disappeared, so too did the gigantic marine reptiles which once terrorized the oceans. For almost twenty-five million years, there was nothing around to eat the sharks. But there are now awesome new monsters of the deep.

• Kenneth Branagh : It is the late Eocene, and the world is still a hot one. However it is drier than before, and so where once the land was completely covered in lush rain forest, there are now more open spaces. Freed from the constraints of living in dense forests, some mammals have started to get larger. Here on the scrub plains, big is beautiful.

• Kenneth Branagh : Like dinosaurs before them, mammals dominate the planet. But they are about to undergo their severest challenge. The climate change the world has seen so far is mild compared to what is coming.

• Kenneth Branagh : [Indicating an ocean]  This is the legendary Tethys, a tropical sea that stretches almost halfway around the world, and has connected Asia with the Atlantic since the time of the dinosaurs. It is now home to one of the mammals' biggest success stories.

• Kenneth Branagh : [about Basilosaurus]  Four times the length of a great white shark, this female weighs sixty tons. Incredible to think then, that their ancestors were tiny, furry, shrew-like animals that lived in trees!

• Kenneth Branagh : For the first time in hundreds of millions of years, the sea is freezing at the Poles, throwing ocean currents into turmoil. For a whale that needs on average eighty kilograms of food a day, the slightest change in fish stocks is bad news. She is at the top of a food chain that is about to collapse, and she has just become pregnant.

• Kenneth Branagh : Dry land and safety are only temporary things in the mangroves. The water still has some way to rise, and most solid ground will become sea bed in just a few hours time, as the high tide sweeps in.

• Kenneth Branagh : This is what it means to be top of the food chain.