Dino Death Trap (2007)

160 million years ago, a massive lava flow in China's Junggar Basin resulted in an eerily preserved "community" akin to the ruins of Pompeii. In this case, not a scene of human domesticity but a spectacular dinosaur graveyard. This program explores the site and evokes one of the most exciting questions in paleontology: how and why did dinosaurs become gigantic? Viewers are shown specimens from the find, including ancestors of Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops and an ancient crocodilian, among many other examples. The program also explains how the Chinese fossils are missing puzzle pieces from a lost era-the Middle Jurassic, when dinosaurs became "supersized" and took over the world.