HotTV CHOICE

Telly historian Dan Snow can barely contain his excitement tonight as he comes face to face with Dippy for the first time in ages.

That’s Dippy the diplodocus, who’s on display at the Natural History Museum. Not to be confused with Dappy from N-Dubz, who currently isn’t.

Dippy is actually a cast created from a bunch of dinosaur bones found in America way back in the 19th century. So he offers us the perfect starting point for the story being told in this featurelength special, INTO DINOSAUR VALLEY WITH DAN SNOW

(9pm, Channel 5)

Did you know (please say you didn’t or I’m wasting my time here) that America’s Wild West was once the scene of a so-called “dinosaur gold rush”, where swarms of eager fossil hunters, who’d descended on the place from all over the shop, fought to get their hands on bones dating back more than 65 million years? It turns out this part of the world used to be packed with dinosaurs of every persuasion – not just our friend the diplodocus but also the triceratops, stegosaurus, T-Rex, Slade, you name it.

And this fossil-hunter fight turned pretty nasty, by all accounts, as Dan discovers when he retraces the steps of those involved.

He also hangs out with some modern-day palaeontologists (they’re a pretty wild bunch, as you can imagine) as they carry out a mountainside dig, and looks to find the answer to the question at the heart of all this – namely, why did this part of the