"Hey, let me in!" "Professor Cutter!" "Professor!" " Professor Cutter..." " Connor Temple." "I'm sorry, I've never heard of it." "I think you want archeology, if you go around up there to the right and keep walking it's on your left." "No, it's not a place, it's my name." "I'm one of your students." "Really?" "Well, why... why don't I recognize you?" "Well, you've never actually turned up for the seminars." "Professor!" "Don't touch anything." "This is my laboratory technician, Stephen Hart." " Hi." " Hi." "Oh, actually, that's my dissertation." "Yeah." "You see I argued that all life on Earth derived... from organisms carried here by alien spacecrafts." "It's pretty sexy stuff." "It's a work in progress, really." "Tell me what this is." "A fish?" "Obviously." "It's a sarcopterygian." "There's no trace of them in the fossil record for 70 million years, and then suddenly one of them just pops up in the middle of the Indian Ocean." "Totally inexplicable in modern evolutionary terms." "See, Darwin provides most of the answers, it's the pieces that don't fit that interest me." "See, that's why I was wondering if you might have seen this." "Some sort of giant, undiscovered predator." "Oh no, no, no, no, no." "This, this is the real thing." "Connor, you should get out more." "Go to a bar." "Meet a nice girl." " Life will seem a lot less confusing." " I've already got a girlfriend." "Sort of." "That's not really the point." "There's an eyewitness, claimed to have seen it." "People claim to have seen the Loch Ness monster, that doesn't mean it's there." "Not now, obviously, because it died years ago." "The Government, they took the body away and covered the whole thing up." "This is just a hoax." "Forget it." "Your wife wouldn't have ignored it." "My wife was a serious scientist." "I just thought you might want to check it out, that's all." "It's not as though the Forest of Dean is far away though." "The Forest of Dean?" "If we leave now we could be there by lunch." "Come on guys, what are you waiting for?" "Soft lighting and a Frank Sinatra record?" "How are Brad and Angelina?" "Oh, totally gay, but otherwise fine." "They should be mating by now." "Maybe they just don't fancy each other." "Abby... a word." "Abby, I'm sorry." "The sponsor's pulled out and I..." "I have to slim down the reptile programme." "And my job comes under the heading 'instant weight loss', right?" "There's an attachment going at the bughouse." "I could put in a word for you." "I'm a lizard girl, Tim." "You know that." "Hello, Tim Parker." "Uh, well, I'll call you back, okay?" "Ok, bye." "Letters." "From people wanting the zoo to collect their animals." "Why do people buy exotic pets if they don't want them?" "Is everything alright?" "I'll handle this one if you like." "It's my field." "I know the Forest of Dean pretty well." "Anyway, so about this attachment." "Yes." "Uh, a six-month project... studying the life cycle of parasites in elephant dung." "Sounds unmissable." "I'd just finished my rounds when I caught a glimpse of it on the monitor." "Can you imagine how much force it took to rip this thing open?" "Look at the size of the marks." "You know, if you want my opinion, I think it's..." "You don't, do you?" "Well, if I found these gouges in the wild, I'd be certain... we were looking for a large predator." "But we're in the Forest of Dean." "It was huge and it was so fast." "It was gone across the yard in a second." "Well, there's blood." "Stephen." "Come and give me a logical explanation for this." "It's a hoax, obviously." "Just a difficult one to pull off." "Can I say something?" "Is he alright?" "Helen Cutter came to this area eight years ago... to investigate a creature sighting." "She disappeared in the forest." "The body was never found." "Just a rucksack." "No blood, no clues, nothing." "She just vanished." " We never expected a personal call." " All part of the zoo service, Mrs. Trent." "It's only a lizard." "I see you like dinosaurs, Ben." "Yeah." "They're awesome." "His name's Rex." "I found him in the forest." "Looked him up in a book and it said he was a flying dragon from Southeast Asia." "Draco Volans." "He's not a Draco Volans." "No?" "In fact, I don't know what he is." " I thought you were an expert." " I am." "If I'm right, you've discovered a completely unique species." "Oh, cool!" "I need you to show me exactly where you found him." "It's too cold for him here." "He must have escaped from a private zoo or something." "I found him around here somewhere." "This way." "Abby!" " Slow down." "Wait for me." " Maybe it was a leopard." "They sometimes drag their prey into trees and come back for it later." "Don't be silly, Ben." "How many leopards are there in the Forest of Dean?" "I don't care." "It's weird." "I'm getting out of here." "Ben, hold on." "Wait for me!" "...no ones as pretty as yours." "I must admit though, I've never seen you around here myself." "And hey, why don't we have a drink afterwards?" "Excuse me." "Don't panic." "I just told that slime ball over there you were my boyfriend." "One more sleazy chat-up line and I was going to have to kill him." "Well, I'm very glad I was here to help." " Uh, I'm Nick Cutter." " Actually, I know who you are." "Claudia Brown, Home Office." "I saw you at the Hotel." "I'm hoping you can do me a favour, Professor." "Another one?" "I suspect this is why we're both here." "We get dozens of rogue animal sightings every year." "You'd be doing me a great favour if you could just confirm this is all nonsense." "I can't dismiss the evidence out of hand." "Surely you're not giving this whole monster story credibility, Professor." "I'm just trying to keep an open mind." "People always say that as though it's such a good thing." "Well, you see, that depends on how you define 'monster'." "A wild panther might look pretty terrifying on a dark night." " Is that what we're dealing with?" " My best guess, if it exists at all." "The last sighting was somewhere near the forest." "Would you care to join the search?" "I suppose I owe it to the taxpayer to do more than... sit in my room and suck the mini bar dry." "This database contains constantly updated information... on all non-extinct vertebrates." "I've been building it every spare second since I was 14." " This is impressive." " It's pretty cool, huh?" "And slightly sad." "You know we're not talking about a wild cat, don't you?" "This is Claudia Brown from the Home Office." " She'll be coming with us." " I knew it." "It's a cover-up." "What's he talking about?" "Connor never met a conspiracy theory he didn't like." "Ben!" "Slow down!" "Ben!" "Rex!" "Not now Rex." "Please come back." "Oh Rex!" "For goodness sake." "Abby!" "Rex." "Come here." "Stop messing around." "If there really were some creature around here, wouldn't the journalists have found it by now?" "They wouldn't know what they were looking for." "But you do." "I've seen Stephen track wounded animals through the rainforest... for up to 10 days at a time." "Not to mention wrestle an anaconda and save a whale." "Maybe there is something here, and maybe there isn't." "Frankly I doubt it." "Cutter!" "Okay, now I'm getting interested." "Professor, the compass is going haywire." "Ben, what on earth is going on in there?" "I want this mess tidied up now!" "Okay, Rex." "Which way now?" "Rex!" "Don't move." "Is it real?" "Some kind of experiment, maybe." "Hybrid, throwback." "Who are you?" "Abby Maitland." "I'm a keeper at Wellington zoo." "It's a reptile." "Five or six tonnes at least." "Large supratemporal bosses." "Huge oesteoderms on it's back." " It must be some kind of anapsid." " A tortoise?" "Stay in his field of vision, you're making him nervous." "I was right, there was a dinosaur in that warehouse." "Whatever it is, it's classified until I figure out what the hell to do about it." "Bloody hell." "There's 2 of them?" "Where did that come from?" "No, I can't use the police." "This is too sensitive." "There are lives at stake here." "Listen, I don't need you to tell me how junior I am, okay?" "You're just going to have to trust me." "Now get somebody down here fast." "I'll be making a complaint." "She's filled his head with all sorts of stupid ideas." "Just look at the state of his room!" "It was the dinosaur!" "The simple truth is Miss Maitland got carried away." "Ben's pet was nothing more exotic than Draco Volans." "It's a Southeast Asian flying lizard." "There was a monster though." "It chased us." "Tell them Abby." "I don't really know what happened Ben." "We just got frightened, that's all." "But I saw the past!" "Prehistoric times." "I was there!" "You saw the past?" "There was desert and rocks and things." "I blame the telly." "Excuse me." "I know you feel bad about lying, but if word of this gets out, who knows what the consequences might be." "You're both going to have to sign the Official Secrets Act." "Whoa, when did this become an Official Secret?" "About 10 minutes after I finally persuaded my boss not to have me sectioned." "You know, well, right now we have a far more urgent problem." "That creature we saw may be many things, but it's certainly not a ruthless predator that drags its prey up into trees." " Well you can't be sure of that." " He can." "It's a herbivore." "Pure veggie." "You mean there's another one out there?" "What did Ben mean when he talked about seeing the past?" "These animals have to be coming from somewhere." "What are you saying?" "I'm saying... that the answer is in that forest." "And maybe Ben found it." "You know this is going to win me the Nobel Prize." "You don't know what we're dealing with yet." "Come on." "It looks like a dinosaur." "It behaves like a dinosaur." "It's a dinosaur." "It's the missing link to the ancient past." " And I discovered it." " Stephen!" "Whoa, where's it going?" "Let him go!" "It's scared!" "Let's see where it thinks it's safe." "Where's it gone?" "Home." "My pen." "That explains the compass going crazy." "What could cause a magnetic field so powerful?" "Maybe it's an alien spaceship." "How are you feeling?" "Confused, frightened." "Exhilarated." "Snap." "You don't think they'll hurt him?" "Of course not." "Everything we've seen about the animals so far is consistent with... vertebrates that last appeared in the fossil record... hundreds of millions of years ago." "You mean they're like creatures from the past?" "No, I mean they are creatures from the past." "Brilliant." "Just brilliant." "Oh, that was my front door key." " Cutter, we have to go now." " You've got your own experts." "They didn't see what we saw, and they don't know what you know." "You're thinking about Helen, aren't you?" " It explains everything." " Except why she didn't come back." "Claudia Brown, Home Office." "Yes, I've seen your file." "James Lester." "I'll be in charge of coordinating our response." "You shouldn't have brought them here." "They have no security clearance." "I don't like civilians in these situations." "How many situations like this have you had?" "How do we know they're not responsible for all this in some way?" "That's not possible." "You spend your entire career planning for just about every crisis imaginable, up to and including alien invasion, then this happens." "So much for thinking outside the bloody box." "Something large has been through here, recently." "I'm not, um, really outdoorsy." "I have sinus issues and allergies." "I'll write you a list." "We can't rely on the army to find this creature, so just keep looking." "It's so close I can sense it." "Shouldn't we just wait for the Professor?" "This phenomenon Professor," " Claudia tells me you have an explanation." " A theory." "The boy's experience proves that there's a concrete landscape... on the other side of the anomaly." "And I think it's the Earth many millions of years ago." "And this anomaly, as you call it, is a door between time zones in the world's history?" "Suppose this remarkable theory is correct, what are the immediate risks?" "Famine, war, pestilence." "The end of the world as we know it." "You know, the usual stuff." "I think I could do without the facetiousness." "Well I could do without standing in some anaemic office in Whitehall, talking to a civil service pen pusher, when I should be exploring the most significant phenomenon... in the history of science." "Technically, I'm not actually a civil servant." "More a troubleshooter without a portfolio in the PM's office." "You mean you're a Government hatchet man." "Colorful, but a surprisingly accurate." "And there's something else you should know." "I intend to find out what happened to my wife, whatever the risks, so I'm going through the anomaly, and if you want to stop me, then you're going to have to shoot me." "I hope we won't come to that." "So... what do you think of Abby?" "She's okay." "Why?" "I was picking up some heat between us." "You get an instinct for these kind of things." "I though you already had a girlfriend." "She's more of a pen pal really." "She, um..." "She lives in the Gambia." "That's practical for a night out." "Yeah." " So do you think Abby likes me?" " Why don't you ask her yourself?" "All right." "I might." "It's not everyday you meet a potential girlfriend." "And find a dinosaur." "Stephen?" "Stephen!" "You really shouldn't handle a lizard like that." "Let the experts do their job." "They don't know what they're doing." "You really shouldn't mess with an angry lizard." "I'm terrified." "Do they even know he can fly?" "Fly?" "Grab it!" "Watch the door!" "Rex!" " He can fly." " Hmm, pretty well." "It's going up." "Well, we'll really have to take a view on that...." "Rex!" "Don't do it, Rex." "It's not your world out there anymore." "Try some of this." "You'll love it." "I promise." "Rex, come back!" "Good decision Rex." "Oh, those risks you were talking about." "There's one I didn't tell you about... running down your back." "It's so perfect." "What's this?" "I think the scientific term is 'really bad news'." "The lizard's DNA confirms your theory." "The creature's a living fossil." "Under the circumstances, I'm going to allow your exploratory mission into the anomaly." "I'm taking the lizard back." "Creatures that don't belong here should be returned to their natural habitat." "It's a disclaimer." "We don't want any nasty lawsuits if you don't come back." "Okay." "My best guess?" "The creature we found was some kind of scutosaurus, late Permian era." "That footprint?" "Definitely not the same animal." "If we are talking late Permian, then this... little charmer is the prime suspect." "It's a gorgonopsid." "It's a compact killing machine, and it's got incredible power." "Stephen, if it is still out there, then you have to find it." "Fast." "What about you?" "You, mighty hunter." "Me, I'm more logistics and, you know, backup." "The sooner you finish your detention Ben, the sooner we can both go home." "Miss!" "Miss, there's a dinosaur in the playground." "Really Ben, how old are you now?" "No, we've got to get out." " Ben, sit down now." " There's a dinosaur!" " Miss, come on!" " Ben, sit down." "Calm down." "Don't open the door." "Don't open it!" "Pick on someone your own size." " Will you call Stephen again?" " He's not answering." "It's 18:55." "I want you back no later than 20:00 hours." "If the first contact works out, we'll take it from there." "What's he doing here?" "This is Captain Ryan." "He's a Gulf war veteran... with extensive desert experience." "We don't know how dangerous it will be on the other side of the anomaly." "No arguments, Cutter." "He goes as well." "Please take care of him." " Look after yourself too." " Yeah, we'll be fine." "Whatever happens, bring him back." "My pen." "The magnetic field didn't take it." "The anomaly is getting weaker." "Give me an hour." "One hour on my own." "I've got a radio." "Helen!" "Professor!" "Professor!" "Over here!" "My God." "People." "Somebody's been here before us." "Well whoever it was they didn't get far." "Over here." "It's 'HC'." "It's 'Helen Cutter'." "Is it her?" "No, it's a man." "How did he die?" "I don't know, uh..." "It's time to go." "Yeah, I can't help that." "I've got to find my wife." " We have to go." " I'm staying." "Sorry Professor." "Don't do that again." "The anomaly!" "It's disappearing!" "Quick!" "Do you want to be trapped here forever?" "I'm staying here to look for my wife." "I'm not leaving you behind." "Well what do you want to do?" "Shoot me?" "All right." "You stay, I stay." "That's ... that's just childish." "All right." "Look!" "They're back." "What did you see?" "There's a camp." "Looks like a military camp." "You're not going to believe it." "What was it like?" "We get him up." " God, you've got to see it." " Well done Ryan." " Oh my God!" " Run!" " Cutter!" " Claudia!" "Quick!" "Stephen!" "Catch!" "We developed the film in the camera you brought back." "It's her." "It's Helen." "I'm sorry for your personal loss, Professor." "This camp that you discovered, there were no clues as to who made it, or what it was for?" "The thought that someone was there before us is far from reassuring." "And I used to think the EU Common Agricultural Policy was far-fetched." "Still, at least the immediate crisis is over." "Some, force, out there, ripped the boundaries of space and time to shreds." "Maybe it's happened before, in which case, every single thing we thought we knew about the Universe is wrong." "Or, this is the first time." "In which case, what changed?" "What happens next?" "Believe me, it's very, very far from over." "Hello?" "Helen!" "Helen!"