Post by creature386 on Aug 14, 2021 15:32:39 GMT 5
The time has finally come. This forum receives a retrospective review that isn't written by Infinity Blade.
The year 2011 has been one of the last high points of the CGI dinosaur documentary genre (though I've heard that there are plenty of new ones being planned for this decade). Not only did we get classics like Marsh of the Dinosaurs, but we also got an epic example of Dueling Work (warning: TVTropes link, Infinite Time Sink Ahead!, scroll down to the segment that discusses DR and PD and don't read anything else! You'll thank me later).
In the one corner, we had Planet Dinosaur - a documentary made to shut up critics who found Walking with Dinosaurs too speculative. But my colleague Infinity Blade will cover that one later.
Today, I've come to discuss a different type of show - its then-rival Dinosaur Revoluton. It first aired on Discovery Channel on 4 September 2011 (guess when the final part of my review will come? guess). Dinosaur Revolution is an ... awkward documentary to say the last. While Planet Dinosaur sticks relatively closely to the CGI dinosaur documentary formula, Dinosaur Revolution mixes aspects of wildlife documentaries, slapstick cartoon humor, and good old vignette episodes. While I'm normally a fan of genre mixing, that premise sounds rather ambitious. While both documentaries succeeded among audiences, critics preferred PD due to its more serious tone.
We'll see how well DR succeeded at being both a documentary and an entertainment piece. In this review, I'll cover both its scientific accuracy and just how well-written I found the episodes.
Let's start with episode one - Evolution's Winners.
I'll do a simple MSTing format which means I'll just watch the episode as I write this and then record my reactions.
-We open with a very atmospheric shot of the Permian-Triassic extinction. I mean, sure, WWD started in the Triassic, too, and it makes sense to begin a dinosaur documentary with the beginning of dinosaurs. It should be noted that DR's vignettes won't be as linear as the episodes from WWD if I remember right, so, we'll sometimes skip forward in time and sometimes backward, although the general trend is that the episodes go farther in the future. Anyway, I think it's a neat idea for an into. The shot starts with a cockroach, only to zoom in onto a starving Inostrancevia which makes for an awesome visual. The whole "this is not a reptile, nor a dinosaur" is not only helpful for those who are barely familiar with prehistoric life at all, but also nicely showcases that this is just a prologue (for everyone else, it serves as a warning of the Captain Obvious Narrator being obvious all the time). Unfortunately, we also get the first glimpse of DR's hallmark style: Unrealistic and overly theatrical animal behavior. I mean, sure, which animal doesn't howl against the moon like a wolf when it's about to be buried by lava? Fortunately, we also already see some of its other hallmarks, like the good CGI and good models (at least to the point that I can tell, not the greatest Inostrancevia expert over here).
-This prologue is succeeded by one of the most epic intros I've ever seen in a dinosaur documentary. No idea how I could ever forget about it.
-After the top-notch intro, we also get an equally top-notch introduction. The narrator (Rick Robles), and our talking heads (Thomas R. Holtz, Matt Lamanna, and Scott D. Sampson) explain what the dinosaur revolution is about. Basically, everything that we thought to know about dinosaurs turned out to be wrong and they were very far from the evolutionary failures or dead ends we thought them to be. As a kid, I always found that very touching, especially with the remark on how birds outnumber mammals today more than two to one.
-After that is done, the show tries to demonstrate how they became so successful and takes us into the Ischigualasto Formation of Argentina, 228 mya. As mentioned earlier, starting in the Triassic very much follows the footsteps of WWD and WDRA. Originally, this segment was supposed to take place in the Chinle Formation, with Coelophysis, and all, but this was changed to Argentinia during production (Wikipedia is your friend[1]). And, honestly, I think that was a great idea. Not only does that make the documentary more original (these mostly North American documentary makers tend to be provincialists), but it's closer to the origin of dinosaurs anyway. Unfortunately, this last-minute switch brings us to the first anatomical blunder I noticed. We see the dicynodont Ischigualastia, but it has tusks and is basically just the Placerias model they originally wanted to use. However, given production constraints and the fact that they used many models during the show, I'm willing to forgive that.
-Most of the episode focuses on Eoraptor and it shows another hallmark of DR: Its beautiful models are also colorful. Something that always fascinated me as a kid. It really drove home the bird-like nature of these animals and was very fresh compared to the more monochrome models of other documentaries. Plus, Scott Hartman later explains why this choice makes a lot of sense. No idea whether it's logical for what was presumably an ambush predator like Saurosuchus, but I'll let that slide for now. For the Eoraptors, it makes perfect sense, as it's mating season and we even have gender-dimorphism (something you very rarely see in these types of documentaries)! Unfortunately, the cartoonish animal behavior becomes obvious here. The female Eoraptor charms our male protagonist (complete with dinosaurian Male Gaze, yes, really!), the male has his jaw hanging, runs over to her, and stumbles on the way. Then, a Saurosuchus (who bounds like a giant crocodile bunny for some reason) attacks and he heroically leads her to the burrow of a bunch of Probelesodonts. When one of the tiny cynodonts becomes angry, our male Eoraptor responds by kicking it into the mouth of the Saurosuchus. The big bad predator is immediately satisfied with such a small meal and goes away...
*Sigh* Not gonna kidding, I found that sort of stuff funny and clever as a kid. Now, it just won't do it for me. There is a stereotype that only children can enjoy dinosaur media and it seems like the DR guys wanted to narrow their target audience as much as possible. I won't cover every such instance in as much detail, but this was the first one.
At least these silly segments are somewhat memorable and entertaining. Many documentaries I've seen recently were really forgettable, albeit less silly.
-We get a segment on Eoraptor parental care which, while still cartoonish, is at least adorable. Only the segment where Saurosuchus tries to catch the baby Eoraptor but stumbles like some incompetent cartoon villain wasn't necessary. Despite its cool design, our villain might be the weakest part of the segment.
Oh, and, to conclude my words on this segment, I've got to give the creator some credit for not referring to Eoraptor as a theropod. The paper re-classifying it came out only a few months before the documentary was aired.[2] It's nice to see that, during this whole three-year production process,[1] they still kept up with the news. Although I think had this documentary been produced today, they'd have used Eodromaeus instead. And they'd have had Eoraptor eat some vegetables, too. That's probably the only scientific thing that dates it so far.
-The next segment jumps to Gigantoraptor; in other words, we're in the Late Cretaceous. This is what I meant when I said it isn't quite as linear as WWD is. While this adds novelty, it might make the format more confusing for those who don't already have the timeline of when these animals lived in their head.
-Speaking of Gigantoraptor, Hartman describes it as a giant turkey and that's how they animate the male, with wattles and all. Well, certainly a rather creative design, even if it's very speculative, but the narrator at least hints that it is based on guesswork. Unfortunately, the mating dance we see (and the music!) is impossible to take seriously, especially the slapstick ending where the male gets his leg stuck in a burrow and falls over. Ouch. At least it's funnier than whatever they were thinking of during the Saurosuchus segments.
It can be seen here:
-We move to the Lower Jurassic of Antarctica (see?) and it's always awesome to see rarely-seen locations with equally awesome rarely-seen taxa like Cryolophosaurus. The storyline is about a pair defending their nest from an aggressive male. The two males have an over-the-top fight that wouldn't be out of place in Jurassic Park and the aggressor wins. He then proceeds to kill their eggs and then mate the female himself. Frankly, I found the fact that the female didn't help her mate incredibly stupid. They claim they modeled this behavior after lions. While it's true that male lions fight over females and will often kill a lioness' cubs to make her more receptive, the lionesses normally defend their babies.[2] They often don't succeed because they are smaller and weaker than the males, but here, it was clearly two on one. I don't know what it's like in birds or anything, but in virtually all animals, producing offspring is far more costly for the female than for the male. That's why males want to reproduce as often as possible while females want to keep the kids they already have. The effect might have been less pronounced in egg-laying dinosaurs than in viviparous mammals, but it was probably still there. If the aggressive male had fought the defending male while the female was absent and she later offered no resistance because she knew she had no chance, I could have bought this, but this way, the whole plot of the segment just feels contrived. It makes me sad to say this, because I really like Cryolophosaurus and this segment definitely had the best (read: the most subtle) humor so far. Andrea Cau had a similar critique.[4]
(On a sorta related note, I don't understand why they used lions as a model in the first place. Lion prides normally have more females than males, so, it makes more sense for their males to be hyperaggressive. Here, however, Cryolophosauruses are depicted as monogamous, so, won't it make more sense to use something like eagles as a model?)
Oh and, the idea of Cryolophosaurus using its crest for sexual display... holds up.[5] I'm really searching hard for cases of Science Marches On here.
-We skip to Late Cretaceous (75 mya) mosasaurs (which, as the narrator kindly reminds us, aren't dinosaurs). We see to a mosasaur mother and her young and no-one has a tail fluke. That paper got released before the documentary was complete,[6] however, it apparently got released after the completion of the CGI model[1] and they didn't want to re-animate this. Again, an excusable model error. Also, they got the coloration completely wrong, as we found skin pigments that indicated that these guys had white bellies and very dark backs.[7] Not something they could have known back then, but couldn't they have made guesses from the way, like, 80% of all big ocean predators today are colored? Anyway, the plot of this segment is that a bunch of sharks (Squalicoarx, apparently) kill baby mosasaurs while their Mom's busy giving birth. The moment she notices them though, she makes short work of them and feeds them to the one remaining baby (and by the end of the episode, it even gets a sibling). TVTropes claims Holtz disowned the mosasaur segment due to the unrealistic behavior.[8] Mickey Mortimer pointed out that the mother was unrealistically vengeful for a squamate.[9] That's probably a valid point. I admit that I kinda overlooked that, maybe because I didn't pay attention or maybe because I thought she only did this to protect the baby that was about to be born, but even then, it was a bit over-the-top. A very memorable segment that's refreshingly free from slapstick humor, but as with the Cryolophosaurus segment, the unrealistic animal behavior is a black mark.
-Finally, we get back to Antarctica to focus on a herd of Glacialisaurus. The narrator claims they are direct ancestors to the big Sauropoda which is a misconception about paleontology and evolution we should rather not be spreading. I like the coloration here. While I like DR's coloration in general, there's often the issue that it gives the animals as much stealth as a yellow raincoat does to a horror movie protagonist. Here, however, it's believable that they could have hidden in the woods with those dark green bodies and lighter-green stripes for males (again, I appreciate the efforts to make basically all of them dimorphic). Our protagonist is a male who isn't successful at finding a harem (he surely wants to get isekai'd right now...) and is driven off to live without a herd. He is attacked by mosquitoes and the aggressive male Cryolophosaurus from before. Our unlucky MC succumbs to the mosquitoes, but the Cryolophosaurus, as karma wills it, soon suffers the same fate.
This segment was mostly fine. The plot was the most unremarkable, but there aren't any notable problems wither. Okay, the DR wikia apparently claims that there is some misplaced wildlife in the form of varanids[10], but I gotta admit that I overlooked them during my re-watch.
This was an okay-ish episode as a whole. As mentioned several times, it introduces us to the strengths and weaknesses of Dinosaur Revolution quite well. I liked the models (with a few exceptions) and most of the animals they showed did in fact co-exist. They don't make glaring research errors and they know when to indicate that something is speculation and how they got their ideas. The main issue I see is that their genre mix isn't always working. There are a few gags I liked, but they're overdoing them.
This episode also doesn't really introduce us to the format of DR so well, mostly because DR doesn't really have a consistent format for its episodes. This one consisted of largely disconnected storylines (except the ones in Antarctica) that were united only by a common theme (mating strategies). The next episode (The Watering Hole) will focus on a single storyline. Not necessarily a deal-breaker, but it's generally better when documentaries (or TV shows in general, really) have some sort of format they stick to. Like that, viewers have an idea of what to expect from each episode.
If TVTropes is to be trusted, they originally wanted to make six episodes with the stories being in chronological order. However, so much stuff ended up on the cutting floor (we were supposed to get a story in Yixian!) that they couldn't keep the chronology anymore. Also, the narrator was originally supposed to be absent and was added at the last minute which might explain why he sounds so incredibly cheesy.[6]
At least the Captain Obvious Narrator prevented DR from making claims that could become outdated later. In fact, I could have written almost exactly the same review ten years ago, minus the little detail on mosasaur skin pigments. Whatever errors it has are mostly limited to its models and the animal behavior and the majority of those were already known when the show aired. It's really the bizarre humor that dates the show more than the science. I liked the show a lot as a kid because the humor was more of a plus than a minus. These days, it's just the opposite. I already wrote about this before on how they probably made this primarily with children in mind and I enjoyed it best when I was a child myself. Nonetheless, the good models and how they mostly survived the progress of science deserve some credit.
3/5 stars for this episode. Next Saturday, we'll see how well the next one holds up.
[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur_Revolution
[2] Packer, C.; Pusey, A. E. (May 1983). "Adaptations of female lions to infanticide by incoming males". American Naturalist. 121 (5): 716–28. doi:10.1086/284097
[3] Martinez, Ricardo N.; Sereno, Paul C.; Alcober, Oscar A.; Colombi, Carina E.; Renne, Paul R.; Montañez, Isabel P.; Currie, Brian S. (2011). "A basal dinosaur from the dawn of the dinosaur era in southwestern Pangaea". Science. 331 (6014): 206–10. Bibcode:2011Sci...331..206M. doi:10.1126/science.1198467
[4] translate.google.com/translate?sl=it&tl=en&u=http://theropoda.blogspot.com/2011/09/cryolophosaurus-fantasy-e-la.html
[5] Chan-gyu, Yun. (2019). "An enigmatic theropod Cryolophosaurus: Reviews and Comments on its paleobiology". Volumina Jurassica. 17: 1–8.
[6] Lindgren, J.; Caldwell, M.W.; Konishi, T.; Chiappe, L.M. (2010). Farke, Andrew Allen (ed.). "Convergent Evolution in Aquatic Tetrapods: Insights from an Exceptional Fossil Mosasaur". PLOS ONE. 5 (8): e11998. Bibcode:2010PLoSO...511998L. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0011998
[7] Johan Lindgren et al. Skin pigmentation provides evidence of convergent melanism in extinct marine reptiles. Nature, published online January 08, 2014; doi: 10.1038/nature12899
[8] tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Trivia/DinosaurRevolution
[9] theropoddatabase.blogspot.com/2011/09/dinosaur-revolution-review.html
[10] dinosaurrevolution.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_scientific_errors
The year 2011 has been one of the last high points of the CGI dinosaur documentary genre (though I've heard that there are plenty of new ones being planned for this decade). Not only did we get classics like Marsh of the Dinosaurs, but we also got an epic example of Dueling Work (warning: TVTropes link, Infinite Time Sink Ahead!, scroll down to the segment that discusses DR and PD and don't read anything else! You'll thank me later).
In the one corner, we had Planet Dinosaur - a documentary made to shut up critics who found Walking with Dinosaurs too speculative. But my colleague Infinity Blade will cover that one later.
Today, I've come to discuss a different type of show - its then-rival Dinosaur Revoluton. It first aired on Discovery Channel on 4 September 2011 (guess when the final part of my review will come? guess). Dinosaur Revolution is an ... awkward documentary to say the last. While Planet Dinosaur sticks relatively closely to the CGI dinosaur documentary formula, Dinosaur Revolution mixes aspects of wildlife documentaries, slapstick cartoon humor, and good old vignette episodes. While I'm normally a fan of genre mixing, that premise sounds rather ambitious. While both documentaries succeeded among audiences, critics preferred PD due to its more serious tone.
We'll see how well DR succeeded at being both a documentary and an entertainment piece. In this review, I'll cover both its scientific accuracy and just how well-written I found the episodes.
Let's start with episode one - Evolution's Winners.
I'll do a simple MSTing format which means I'll just watch the episode as I write this and then record my reactions.
-We open with a very atmospheric shot of the Permian-Triassic extinction. I mean, sure, WWD started in the Triassic, too, and it makes sense to begin a dinosaur documentary with the beginning of dinosaurs. It should be noted that DR's vignettes won't be as linear as the episodes from WWD if I remember right, so, we'll sometimes skip forward in time and sometimes backward, although the general trend is that the episodes go farther in the future. Anyway, I think it's a neat idea for an into. The shot starts with a cockroach, only to zoom in onto a starving Inostrancevia which makes for an awesome visual. The whole "this is not a reptile, nor a dinosaur" is not only helpful for those who are barely familiar with prehistoric life at all, but also nicely showcases that this is just a prologue (for everyone else, it serves as a warning of the Captain Obvious Narrator being obvious all the time). Unfortunately, we also get the first glimpse of DR's hallmark style: Unrealistic and overly theatrical animal behavior. I mean, sure, which animal doesn't howl against the moon like a wolf when it's about to be buried by lava? Fortunately, we also already see some of its other hallmarks, like the good CGI and good models (at least to the point that I can tell, not the greatest Inostrancevia expert over here).
-This prologue is succeeded by one of the most epic intros I've ever seen in a dinosaur documentary. No idea how I could ever forget about it.
-After the top-notch intro, we also get an equally top-notch introduction. The narrator (Rick Robles), and our talking heads (Thomas R. Holtz, Matt Lamanna, and Scott D. Sampson) explain what the dinosaur revolution is about. Basically, everything that we thought to know about dinosaurs turned out to be wrong and they were very far from the evolutionary failures or dead ends we thought them to be. As a kid, I always found that very touching, especially with the remark on how birds outnumber mammals today more than two to one.
-After that is done, the show tries to demonstrate how they became so successful and takes us into the Ischigualasto Formation of Argentina, 228 mya. As mentioned earlier, starting in the Triassic very much follows the footsteps of WWD and WDRA. Originally, this segment was supposed to take place in the Chinle Formation, with Coelophysis, and all, but this was changed to Argentinia during production (Wikipedia is your friend[1]). And, honestly, I think that was a great idea. Not only does that make the documentary more original (these mostly North American documentary makers tend to be provincialists), but it's closer to the origin of dinosaurs anyway. Unfortunately, this last-minute switch brings us to the first anatomical blunder I noticed. We see the dicynodont Ischigualastia, but it has tusks and is basically just the Placerias model they originally wanted to use. However, given production constraints and the fact that they used many models during the show, I'm willing to forgive that.
-Most of the episode focuses on Eoraptor and it shows another hallmark of DR: Its beautiful models are also colorful. Something that always fascinated me as a kid. It really drove home the bird-like nature of these animals and was very fresh compared to the more monochrome models of other documentaries. Plus, Scott Hartman later explains why this choice makes a lot of sense. No idea whether it's logical for what was presumably an ambush predator like Saurosuchus, but I'll let that slide for now. For the Eoraptors, it makes perfect sense, as it's mating season and we even have gender-dimorphism (something you very rarely see in these types of documentaries)! Unfortunately, the cartoonish animal behavior becomes obvious here. The female Eoraptor charms our male protagonist (complete with dinosaurian Male Gaze, yes, really!), the male has his jaw hanging, runs over to her, and stumbles on the way. Then, a Saurosuchus (who bounds like a giant crocodile bunny for some reason) attacks and he heroically leads her to the burrow of a bunch of Probelesodonts. When one of the tiny cynodonts becomes angry, our male Eoraptor responds by kicking it into the mouth of the Saurosuchus. The big bad predator is immediately satisfied with such a small meal and goes away...
*Sigh* Not gonna kidding, I found that sort of stuff funny and clever as a kid. Now, it just won't do it for me. There is a stereotype that only children can enjoy dinosaur media and it seems like the DR guys wanted to narrow their target audience as much as possible. I won't cover every such instance in as much detail, but this was the first one.
At least these silly segments are somewhat memorable and entertaining. Many documentaries I've seen recently were really forgettable, albeit less silly.
-We get a segment on Eoraptor parental care which, while still cartoonish, is at least adorable. Only the segment where Saurosuchus tries to catch the baby Eoraptor but stumbles like some incompetent cartoon villain wasn't necessary. Despite its cool design, our villain might be the weakest part of the segment.
Oh, and, to conclude my words on this segment, I've got to give the creator some credit for not referring to Eoraptor as a theropod. The paper re-classifying it came out only a few months before the documentary was aired.[2] It's nice to see that, during this whole three-year production process,[1] they still kept up with the news. Although I think had this documentary been produced today, they'd have used Eodromaeus instead. And they'd have had Eoraptor eat some vegetables, too. That's probably the only scientific thing that dates it so far.
-The next segment jumps to Gigantoraptor; in other words, we're in the Late Cretaceous. This is what I meant when I said it isn't quite as linear as WWD is. While this adds novelty, it might make the format more confusing for those who don't already have the timeline of when these animals lived in their head.
-Speaking of Gigantoraptor, Hartman describes it as a giant turkey and that's how they animate the male, with wattles and all. Well, certainly a rather creative design, even if it's very speculative, but the narrator at least hints that it is based on guesswork. Unfortunately, the mating dance we see (and the music!) is impossible to take seriously, especially the slapstick ending where the male gets his leg stuck in a burrow and falls over. Ouch. At least it's funnier than whatever they were thinking of during the Saurosuchus segments.
It can be seen here:
-We move to the Lower Jurassic of Antarctica (see?) and it's always awesome to see rarely-seen locations with equally awesome rarely-seen taxa like Cryolophosaurus. The storyline is about a pair defending their nest from an aggressive male. The two males have an over-the-top fight that wouldn't be out of place in Jurassic Park and the aggressor wins. He then proceeds to kill their eggs and then mate the female himself. Frankly, I found the fact that the female didn't help her mate incredibly stupid. They claim they modeled this behavior after lions. While it's true that male lions fight over females and will often kill a lioness' cubs to make her more receptive, the lionesses normally defend their babies.[2] They often don't succeed because they are smaller and weaker than the males, but here, it was clearly two on one. I don't know what it's like in birds or anything, but in virtually all animals, producing offspring is far more costly for the female than for the male. That's why males want to reproduce as often as possible while females want to keep the kids they already have. The effect might have been less pronounced in egg-laying dinosaurs than in viviparous mammals, but it was probably still there. If the aggressive male had fought the defending male while the female was absent and she later offered no resistance because she knew she had no chance, I could have bought this, but this way, the whole plot of the segment just feels contrived. It makes me sad to say this, because I really like Cryolophosaurus and this segment definitely had the best (read: the most subtle) humor so far. Andrea Cau had a similar critique.[4]
(On a sorta related note, I don't understand why they used lions as a model in the first place. Lion prides normally have more females than males, so, it makes more sense for their males to be hyperaggressive. Here, however, Cryolophosauruses are depicted as monogamous, so, won't it make more sense to use something like eagles as a model?)
Oh and, the idea of Cryolophosaurus using its crest for sexual display... holds up.[5] I'm really searching hard for cases of Science Marches On here.
-We skip to Late Cretaceous (75 mya) mosasaurs (which, as the narrator kindly reminds us, aren't dinosaurs). We see to a mosasaur mother and her young and no-one has a tail fluke. That paper got released before the documentary was complete,[6] however, it apparently got released after the completion of the CGI model[1] and they didn't want to re-animate this. Again, an excusable model error. Also, they got the coloration completely wrong, as we found skin pigments that indicated that these guys had white bellies and very dark backs.[7] Not something they could have known back then, but couldn't they have made guesses from the way, like, 80% of all big ocean predators today are colored? Anyway, the plot of this segment is that a bunch of sharks (Squalicoarx, apparently) kill baby mosasaurs while their Mom's busy giving birth. The moment she notices them though, she makes short work of them and feeds them to the one remaining baby (and by the end of the episode, it even gets a sibling). TVTropes claims Holtz disowned the mosasaur segment due to the unrealistic behavior.[8] Mickey Mortimer pointed out that the mother was unrealistically vengeful for a squamate.[9] That's probably a valid point. I admit that I kinda overlooked that, maybe because I didn't pay attention or maybe because I thought she only did this to protect the baby that was about to be born, but even then, it was a bit over-the-top. A very memorable segment that's refreshingly free from slapstick humor, but as with the Cryolophosaurus segment, the unrealistic animal behavior is a black mark.
-Finally, we get back to Antarctica to focus on a herd of Glacialisaurus. The narrator claims they are direct ancestors to the big Sauropoda which is a misconception about paleontology and evolution we should rather not be spreading. I like the coloration here. While I like DR's coloration in general, there's often the issue that it gives the animals as much stealth as a yellow raincoat does to a horror movie protagonist. Here, however, it's believable that they could have hidden in the woods with those dark green bodies and lighter-green stripes for males (again, I appreciate the efforts to make basically all of them dimorphic). Our protagonist is a male who isn't successful at finding a harem (he surely wants to get isekai'd right now...) and is driven off to live without a herd. He is attacked by mosquitoes and the aggressive male Cryolophosaurus from before. Our unlucky MC succumbs to the mosquitoes, but the Cryolophosaurus, as karma wills it, soon suffers the same fate.
This segment was mostly fine. The plot was the most unremarkable, but there aren't any notable problems wither. Okay, the DR wikia apparently claims that there is some misplaced wildlife in the form of varanids[10], but I gotta admit that I overlooked them during my re-watch.
This was an okay-ish episode as a whole. As mentioned several times, it introduces us to the strengths and weaknesses of Dinosaur Revolution quite well. I liked the models (with a few exceptions) and most of the animals they showed did in fact co-exist. They don't make glaring research errors and they know when to indicate that something is speculation and how they got their ideas. The main issue I see is that their genre mix isn't always working. There are a few gags I liked, but they're overdoing them.
This episode also doesn't really introduce us to the format of DR so well, mostly because DR doesn't really have a consistent format for its episodes. This one consisted of largely disconnected storylines (except the ones in Antarctica) that were united only by a common theme (mating strategies). The next episode (The Watering Hole) will focus on a single storyline. Not necessarily a deal-breaker, but it's generally better when documentaries (or TV shows in general, really) have some sort of format they stick to. Like that, viewers have an idea of what to expect from each episode.
If TVTropes is to be trusted, they originally wanted to make six episodes with the stories being in chronological order. However, so much stuff ended up on the cutting floor (we were supposed to get a story in Yixian!) that they couldn't keep the chronology anymore. Also, the narrator was originally supposed to be absent and was added at the last minute which might explain why he sounds so incredibly cheesy.[6]
At least the Captain Obvious Narrator prevented DR from making claims that could become outdated later. In fact, I could have written almost exactly the same review ten years ago, minus the little detail on mosasaur skin pigments. Whatever errors it has are mostly limited to its models and the animal behavior and the majority of those were already known when the show aired. It's really the bizarre humor that dates the show more than the science. I liked the show a lot as a kid because the humor was more of a plus than a minus. These days, it's just the opposite. I already wrote about this before on how they probably made this primarily with children in mind and I enjoyed it best when I was a child myself. Nonetheless, the good models and how they mostly survived the progress of science deserve some credit.
3/5 stars for this episode. Next Saturday, we'll see how well the next one holds up.
[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur_Revolution
[2] Packer, C.; Pusey, A. E. (May 1983). "Adaptations of female lions to infanticide by incoming males". American Naturalist. 121 (5): 716–28. doi:10.1086/284097
[3] Martinez, Ricardo N.; Sereno, Paul C.; Alcober, Oscar A.; Colombi, Carina E.; Renne, Paul R.; Montañez, Isabel P.; Currie, Brian S. (2011). "A basal dinosaur from the dawn of the dinosaur era in southwestern Pangaea". Science. 331 (6014): 206–10. Bibcode:2011Sci...331..206M. doi:10.1126/science.1198467
[4] translate.google.com/translate?sl=it&tl=en&u=http://theropoda.blogspot.com/2011/09/cryolophosaurus-fantasy-e-la.html
[5] Chan-gyu, Yun. (2019). "An enigmatic theropod Cryolophosaurus: Reviews and Comments on its paleobiology". Volumina Jurassica. 17: 1–8.
[6] Lindgren, J.; Caldwell, M.W.; Konishi, T.; Chiappe, L.M. (2010). Farke, Andrew Allen (ed.). "Convergent Evolution in Aquatic Tetrapods: Insights from an Exceptional Fossil Mosasaur". PLOS ONE. 5 (8): e11998. Bibcode:2010PLoSO...511998L. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0011998
[7] Johan Lindgren et al. Skin pigmentation provides evidence of convergent melanism in extinct marine reptiles. Nature, published online January 08, 2014; doi: 10.1038/nature12899
[8] tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Trivia/DinosaurRevolution
[9] theropoddatabase.blogspot.com/2011/09/dinosaur-revolution-review.html
[10] dinosaurrevolution.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_scientific_errors
But I think it's pretty much going to be how you'd expect.