First in series: Walking With Monsters
Second in series: Walking With Dinosaurs
Third in series: Walking With Beasts
Fourth and final in series: Walking With Cavemen
Episode 1: Water Dwellers
Walking with Monsters is a three-part British documentary film series about life in the Paleozoic, bringing to life extinct arthropods, fish, amphibians, synapsids, and reptiles. As with all Walking with … installments, it is narrated by Kenneth Branagh, and by Avery Brooks in the American version.
Using state-of-the-art visual effects of its time, this prequel to Walking with Dinosaurs shows for example how a two-ton predatory fish came on land to hunt. The series draws on the knowledge of over 600 scientists and shows nearly 300 million years of Paleozoic history, from the Cambrian Period (530 million years ago) to the Early Triassic Period (248 million years ago).
The first episode begins with an illustration of the giant impact hypothesis: approximately 4.4 billion years ago when the Earth was formed, it is conjectured that a planet-like object referred to as Theia collided into the early Earth, dynamically reshaping the Earth and forming the moon. The episode then jumps ahead to the Cambrian Explosion, showing the first diversification of life in the sea.
Alternative link: StageVu
