Animated prehistorical insights into the post temporal bestiary

I missed the broadcast on telly tonight because I was out a meeting, but I'm looking forward to watching a tape of "Walking with Beasts", the BBC's sequel to their excellent "Walking with Dinosaurs". The series uses the same style of sophisticated computer animation used in the earlier series but focuses this time on prehistoric mammals and should therefore show many of the strange creatures (smilodons etc) that we find mentioned in the pages of the Urth cycle. (I'm assuming that "Walking with Beasts" is going to be shown in the States, and elsewhere? "Walking with Dinosaurs" was, and I think that I'm write in saying that it had American co-funding.) The creatures which inhabit Severian's world may be close analogues rather than exact reincarnations of the extinct species whose names they bear, but I for one am looking forward to learning more about the bizarre originals and will hope to have a slightly better understanding of Urth's bestiary as a result. I take Wolfe's decision to draw on the early mammals for his post-historic zoo to be a stroke of genius, analogous to his use of the Byzantine world for some features of Urth's human society. For those of us who are not mediaeval specialists, the world of Byzantium is even less familiar than that of ancient Rome. Similarly, unless we are mammalian palaeontologists, the early mammals are probably even less well known than their forebears the dinosaurs. In selecting the nomenclature of Urth, Wolfe seems to have an unfailing ear for the interestingly obscure. Nigel

... Sounds like fun. But no flightless birds? You won't be able to see how Thecla stalked?