Little Rann Desert. 4
Planet Doc Full Documentaries
When the first white colonists arrived here, they found a completely different world, from one that they had imagined covered in impenetrable jungle and inhabited by strange creatures.
The ancient Greeks deduced that in the Southern Hemisphere there must be enormous unexplored landmasses. A mysterious place, full of gold, with an ideal climate and docile natives..
Spanish and Portuguese explorers searched in vain for this lost continent, which by this time everyone was calling Terra Australis Incognita.
When the first white colonists arrived here, they found a completely different world, from one that they had imagined covered in impenetrable jungle and inhabited by strange creatures.
A land forgotten by time, a world which had been left behind, lost in the mists of evolution, retaining much of the original life of the long since vanished supercontinent, Gondwana.
Nothing was familiar to them, but no one doubted that this was a land of natural splendours, an explosion of life from the depths of time.
This is the story of a land caught in its own time bubble, which was suddenly invaded by outsiders; it is the story of the last creatures of independent evolution, the only modern descendents of those who lost in the strange game of evolution.
Two of these were to suffer different, but similar, fates. Both were to become living – or extinct? – legends.
We are going to an island where no one is safe.
Tasmania is an island which lies to south of the Australian continent, from which it became definitively separated around thirteen million years ago. This isolation occurred after thousands of years of shared evolution, meaning that Tasmania has to this day conserved relics of the primeval, universal forest which once stretched right around the world, some 250 million years ago.
At that time, all dry land in the southern hemisphere formed an enormous, compact mass – the supercontinent called Gondwana.
The proof of this can be found along the coasts which, ripped apart form each other, still preserve common geological features.
Gondwana included the present lands of Australia, the Antarctic, Africa, South America and India. The breakup of the supercontinent brought great changes; titanic forces created new seas, moving continents, and cooling the climate. Australia, along with Tasmania, drifted to east of the Antarctic.
The scars of the great wound healed and hardened to form fossils of the creatures that lived at that time, and which can today be found in all the pieces of this immense jigsaw puzzle. Despite the enormous distances now, the edges reveal that these coasts and those of South America are parts of the same mass.