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While presenting various lesser-known prehistoric giant creatures, various paleontologists explain how fossil analysis works and how they can deduce characteristics, behavior and look of these long extinct animals.

Nigel's plan this time is to go to Upper Carboniferous Arran, and save some giant bugs that time has left behind.

Another anomaly opens in the London Underground, this time leading to the carboniferous period. When the team arrive they deal with giant arachnids but a more dangerous creature hides in the shadows.

Insects outnumber humans by a lot and we only like to think we're in charge because we're bigger than they are. But insects and other arthropods weren't always so small. About 315 million years ago during the Carboniferous Period, they were not only abundant: they were enormous.

During the Carboniferous period animals were just venturing onto the land and a millipede known as Arthropleura grew to such size it became the apex predator.

The large deposits of coal we continue to rely on on for energy since the down of the Industrial Revolution date back to a unique time in Earth's history. It was the Carboniferous period when all the contents merged to form Pangea.

In the early Paleozoic Australia is a coastal region of the super-continent Gondwana making it the scene of life's invasion of the land. But not all the action was on land as fish began to dominate the oceans and Australia has a wealth of superb fossils of early fish and other sea creatures.

Dimetrodon is a early synapsid. It is a genus of animals in the transition from reptiles to mammals so it is not a dinosaur. Research has overturned many misconceptions about these animals.

Arthropleura was a huge millipede that lived during the Carboniferous period thanks to the high atmospheric oxygen level of the time.

It took the development of genomics for scientists to make much progress understanding where viruses came from. There are now a few predominant theories but just about anything is still on the table.

A survey of early vertebrates.

Amphibians arose in the Carboniferous period with some favoring a terrestrial environment while others remained aquatic but in both case growing to tremendous sizes. As the Earth became dryer during the Permian period large amphibians struggled in favor of animals with hard shelled eggs, such as Dimetrodon, that didn't require an aquatic environment. But amphibians made a resurgence in the wetter Triassic.

The two huge Clearwater craters in Quebec were not formed by a binary asteroid as originally thought but by two correspondingly massive asteroids of very different origins that crashed to Earth 174 million years and 7500 kilometers apart.

As the first animals to colonize Earth's land mass arthropods had free reign to experiment with terrestrial evolution leading to a giant millipede named arthropleura. As oxygen levels increased other giant arthropods appeared but ultimately these giants could not compete with the air breathing animals that were emerging from the seas.