The Ballad of Big Al – A Retrospective Review

[Infinity Blade]

The Ballad of Big Al – A Retrospective Review



So Walking with Dinosaurs was a huge success back in 1999. So what’s a logical step? Well, aside from a sequel-> and a prequel->, there’s also a special. And that came in the form of The Ballad of Big Al, which premiered in 2000.

Creating this must not have been too big of an ask for the creators of WWD, considering they already created a whole TV episode with the same relevant animals. It’s also only as long as a typical WWD episode, it’s just centered on a single, actual fossil dinosaur specimen. As a result, I found it fitting to create a quick review for it just now. So…let’s go!

• I noticed that in the intro, right after the sun rises and we cut to the shot of the sun in the distance, there’s no animal calling out like in the intros for conventional WWD episodes. Wonder if that signifies it’s a special episode or something.
• Unlike most conventional WWD episodes, the Ballad starts out in a modern setting, in the University of Wyoming’s Geological Museum. At the end of this special, we cut back to it, and the reason is because the producers wanted to respond to criticisms that the stuff in WWD was not based on evidence. By showing Big Al’s pathology-ridden skeleton, they would (or at least should) have shut those same critics up this time around. Although, I always felt that even if they didn’t do this, like with the original WWD episodes, it’s not like we have no idea where they based their ideas and content on.
• ”…145 million year old grave”
  
  So much, much later on after this special aired, a new species of Allosaurus was formally described, A. jimmadseni (Chure & Loewen, 2020). One of the Allosaurus specimens referred to this species is Big Al (MOR 693). This species is known from rocks dating to ~157-152 Ma (Chure & Loewen, 2020). So something like 155 Ma is more like it for Big Al, about ten million years earlier than stated here. This is important to note because Allosaurus was a long-lasting genus, and lasted for the final ten million years of the Jurassic (~155-145 Ma). A. jimmadseni was an earlier species of Allosaurus.
• When Branagh is discussing the clutch of eggs that our story begins with, his voice is a lot more gentle and soothing than I ever remember from the conventional WWD episodes. Since he is talking about baby dinosaurs that are about to hatch, this is fitting, although I don’t think he has this same voice when he’s narrating about hatchling dinosaurs in WWD. It’s interesting to see Branagh’s subtly changing approaches to narrating here.
• I'd also like to mention that it’s really great to see Allosaurus as the protagonist in a coming of age story in the Walking with franchise. The great thing about nature docs is that you can make protagonists and antagonists out of anyone, a fact that WWD takes full advantage of by having this special. In "Time of the Titans" the protagonists were the Diplodocus (especially one young female), while the Allosaurus featured in the episode were clearly antagonists. This is completely reversed in the Ballad. Rarely in the WW franchise do you get to experience the perspectives of two different species in the same ecosystem, and between predator and prey, no less. The only other time it happened is in Walking with Beasts and Cavemen, where woolly mammoths and Neanderthals, respectively were the main foci/protagonists (and even their predator-prey relationship was depicted in both).
• I know we have material from allosaurid hatchlings (Rauhut et al., 2005), but I don’t really know what to say about the models for the hatchling Allosaurus. As far as I can tell, we just don’t have as much knowledge on how their bodies changed morphologically as they aged as we do with say, tyrannosaurids. I mean, their femora grew more robust with age->, but that’s obvious.
  
  The adult Allosaurus model, of course, is the same as the one from "Time of the Titans". If we were to redo this model today, I think one of the most notable changes we’d make would be the overall skull shape, making the snout/face less smushed in. This-> is what the WWD Allosaurus head looks like (with the Jurassic World Evolution 2 Allosaurus for comparison, I guess), while this is Big Al’s real skull->.
• Al’s mother uses her hand claws to dig open the nest and free her hatchlings. She rakes backwards, although given how we now know that theropods could not pronate their hands, I don’t think this is possible. If she did use her hand claws to pry open her nest, she’d probably be raking inwards with them. Alternatively, she could use her foot claws to do so.
• Branagh tells us that in just seven short years Al could be big like his mother.
  
  But if you know, you know…
  
  Actually, what am I saying? Of course you know Big Al’s going to die, his skeleton’s literally in the opening scene.
• Because this is the WW-verse, the models are the same, as is some of the soundtrack. One of the tracks from WWD plays as we see the fauna of the Morrison. But one animal we’ve never seen before is Apatosaurus. It seems to just be a modified version of their Diplodocus model. It looks more robust, is green with a splotchy skin pattern, and lacks dorsal spines. Though, they only serve as background characters, and are stated by the narration to be too big for even Allosaurus to take on, so they’re not significant, especially not to our Allosaurus protagonist.
• ”And fighting among themselves is a good way to start.”
  
  For once, letting your kids fight each other is a good way to raise them.
• A couple of Ornitholestes are seen spying on the hatchlings and their mother. This time, they make different noises than they did in WWD. Instead of their high-pitched “squawks” (for lack of a better word, I don’t know what to call their more quiet noise) and cries, they make lower-pitched hisses.
  
  Because it’s the same model as the original WWD one, the inaccuracies are the same. No evidence now for a nasal crest (this was originally based on a broken piece of bone around the nasal region), and the head looks *maybe* a bit too large for its size(?).
• The track that plays as the Allosaurus hatchlings hunt for insects and scorpions is pretty good. Definitely fitting for these mini predators trying to learn their trade with limited success (one of them even falls in the water as it leaps for a dragonfly).
• A year-old Allosaurus ambushes the hatchlings as their mother is hunting, and nabs one of them. This would have been a good time to use another theropod hitherto not shown in the WW-verse as an antagonist baby killer, like Stokesosaurus, Marshosaurus, or even Ceratosaurus (the last of which is reasonably well known to dinosaur enthusiasts). However, a juvenile Allosaurus is fine too.
  
  Al’s mother is seen returning without a kill, so unfortunately it seems she was unsuccessful. Looks like this is not her day.
• Fun fact: the Big Al game that used to be available to play on the BBC Science and Nature website allows for the possibility that the player (playing as Big Al obviously) loses the game by the mother not recognizing Al and eating them. We don’t see the hatchlings leaving their mother, but whoever made the game really paid attention to the detail about the mother eventually seeing her own babies as food.
• We cut forward two years. One of Al’s potential prey items at this point (he is stated to be 3 meters long at this age) are “Othnielia”. While Othnielia is, at least in my opinion, a nostalgic name that rolls off the tongue easily, it is now recognized as a junior synonym of Nanosaurus.
  
  An interesting detail is that they’re hard to access for Al because they trail behind a Stegosaurus as they feed. This isn’t the same scenario I mention here, but it makes me think of juvenile herbivorous dinosaurs sticking close to adult counterparts for added protection. To my knowledge, this is by no means out of the question. Why do I bring this up? Even “baby killing” wasn’t necessarily a walk in the park for predatory dinosaurs. Larger, much more dangerous adults would be actively trying to protect the young, or at the very least be perturbed by the predator’s presence, and would therefore attempt to defend themselves. Theropods trying to kill babies must either try to nab their small prey while evading (and not properly fighting) some angry hulking behemoth trying to murder their ass (whether it’s because they’re literally not a match for this giant adult dinosaur or because they don’t want to risk injury in this circumstance), or they must switch to the adult as their new target anyway.
• For once we actually get to see the egg thief/hatchling predator Ornitholestes caring for its own brood of eggs and fiercely protecting them (from Al). It’s a bit of a break from the role Ornitholestes has been depicted playing up until this point, which I think is nice.
  
  Also, some of the sounds the mother Ornitholestes makes are recycled from the Dromaeosaurus in Death of a Dynasty.
• Known Dryosaurus specimens are actually as long as Al is supposed to be here (3 meters long; at this length they are estimated to weigh 100 kg), and they’re not even adults (Horner et al., 2010). So these would actually be pretty respectably sized prey for him, if indeed he’d only be 3 meters long at age 2.
• My goofy ass only now just realizing that the Dryosaurus and Nanosaurus share the same model with the Leaellynasaura from "Spirits of the Ice Forest" and the unidentified small ornithopod from "Death of a Dynasty" (Thescelosaurus?). They had no problem featuring two different genera of boring-ass* small ornithopods, but couldn’t be bothered to show a Ceratosaurus, but then this very fact hit me.
  
  *I’m just kidding of course, don’t grill me ornithopod fans.
• Al fails to nab a Dryosaurus because he’s too slow and hasn’t learned to ambush yet. Wait, really? He’s been alive for two years and the concept of sneaking up on prey that are too fast for him hasn’t come up to him yet?! Yeah, he’s a non-human animal, but still. What’s he been living off of recently? We learn later that he’s been avoiding carrion, so it can’t be that.
• Oh right, I forgot he takes a lizard, so I guess that’s one prey species he could’ve been feeding on recently.
  
  Though, given WW’s tendency to use extant animals to live act certain extinct species, it wouldn’t surprise me if they decided to use some random lizard to play the part of an extinct rhynchocephalian. Rhynchocephalia is the order that living tuataras belong to. During the Triassic and Jurassic, these reptiles were diverse in form and occupied a substantial number of niches. In addition to omnivores (like the living tuatara), there were durophages (eating hard objects), herbivores, insectivores, and piscivores. However, rhynchocephalians declined during the Cretaceous, leaving only one extant species of the entire order (Herrera-Flores et al., 2017). There were certainly sphenodonts in the Morrison too (link->).
  
  However, it’s a lizard live-acting this thing, and squamates were also around during this time, so the simplest explanation is it’s a (random) lizard.
• Al finds and avoids a predator trap that already has a dead Stegosaurus and a mired and dying Allosaurus. An adult female Allosaurus is attracted to the carcass but gets stuck herself, leaving three carcasses to scavenging anurognathids.
  
  I’m pretty sure this is inspired by the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry. One popular hypothesis for why so many dinosaur bones were concentrated here is that it was a predator trap, where dinosaurs would get mired in the mud, die, and attract scavengers that themselves got stuck and perished (like a Late Jurassic version of the La Brea Tar Pits). However, this was just one hypothesis among multiple, and the evidence isn’t completely consistent with all of them (a problem with the predator trap hypothesis is that comparatively few bones are tooth-marked, compared to over half of those from Rancho La Brea bearing feeding traces).
  
  A 2017 paper examined the taphonomic data of the quarry and proposed the following. First, dinosaur carcasses were washed into what is now the CLDQ during a flood. The massive amounts of dinosaur carcasses meant a lot of decay (discouraging scavenging because it was just *that* putrid). Water levels would go down, leaving bones that weren’t buried during the flood stage on the surface of the deposit. These bones would then be weathered down during arid conditions (explaining all the bone fragments), until another flood stage washed more dinosaur carcasses into the mix, rinse and repeat (Peterson et al., 2017).
• Anurognathids (which are back from "Time of the Titans") are now understood to have been insectivores, similar to modern caprimulgids (nightjars). I wonder if they would still have been interested in rotting dinosaur bodies.
• The episode cuts three years later so that now Al is five years old. This is the coolest part of the special.
  
  A massive herd of Diplodocus are migrating on top of some salt plains. Ngl, they look kind of weird from front view as they walk. Their necks are lower than their tails, which look like they’re sticking up as their whip-like ends perpetually move like they do in WWD.
• Al is said to be 9 meters long at this age. The real Al was definitely not this big, closer to 7.57 meters long at death (Bates et al., 2012).
• This entire scene…*chef’s kisses*.
  
  A bunch of Allosaurus have congregated for this occasion to take down a Diplodocus, particularly a sick one. They run around, panicking the herd to flee and leaving the weakling to die at their hands (claws?). As this is happening, “Battle of the Salt Plains” plays in the background. This epic track is easily one of the best in the entire Walking with series, and certainly among the best in Walking with Dinosaurs. The track perfectly matches the high intensity vibe of the Allosaurus having to bob and weave through colossal sauropods that could easily break every bone in their body (one of which appears to slap the camera with its neck), so intense that one Allosaurus even trips and falls on its shoulder (now you’re starting to get a sense of what kind of rough lifestyle battered Big Al so much). It also matches the urgency of the sauropods to flee, lest one of them falls victim to this mass of rhino-sized, Komodo dragon-toothed, meathook-clawed predators.
• The Diplodocus is brought down and the Allosaurus hardly even touch it because hours of being under the heat and illness are what finally kill the sauropod. It would have been cool to see some Allosaurus taking bites out of the sauropod (that is what their jaws are for, after all), but this is fine too. And considering Al tries doing just this, but gets knocked to the ground by the Diplodocus’ neck for his troubles, it’s possible the others were discouraged from making physical contact afterwards.
  
  Another interesting tidbit is that while the Allosaurus are grouping together to take down this sauropod, they’re not 100% buddies either, as Branagh implies (“The competition is too fierce”). This implies that while they may be willing to work together to bring down large prey, it’s every allosaur for itself once the food is on the table (implying that they’re not a tight-knit family group like a pack of wolves or lions*). As far as the theropod pack hunting debate goes, I think this is plausible.
  
  23 years on, and this is arguably still the best theropod vs sauropod hunt depicted in media.
  
  *And I mean, who cares if they’re not? If they’re taking something huge down in a group, that’s all that matters if you want to depict theropods hunting together.
• One odd thing I noticed is that the CGI model for the Diplodocus completely lacks any claws or nails on any of its feet. The model for the dead carcass, though, has multiple nails/claws on each foot.
• A large female Allosaurus arrives and establishes her dominance at the carcass. Branagh states that individuals her size rarely have to hunt and can just steal kills. Years afterwards, an energetics-based study showed that it’s actually the opposite. Theropods had an optimal size range for living off of scavenging. Those weighing between 27 and 1,044 kg would have had a significant advantage in obtaining energy through scavenging over theropods on either ends of this extreme (which, when you think about it, kind of makes sense) (Kane et al., 2016). Even Big Al himself was most likely above this upper size threshold (Bates et al., 2009), let alone an exceptionally large Allosaurus individual.
• The Allosaurus roar here is what I’ll always hear when I imagine an Allosaurus vocalizing in my head.
• Al becomes sexually mature at age 6. There was a 2008 study that found Allosaurus would have become sexually mature by age 10 (Lee & Werning, 2008), although I don’t know enough about the subject to know if there are any subsequent, more refined estimates.
• It’s interesting to see that Al’s presence and the smell of blood on him is enough to make a mating pair of Stegosaurus nervous around him, signifying that he is now a serious predator of large animals now. A predator-prey relationship between Allosaurus and Stegosaurus is also known from the fossil record too.
• Then our boy tries his luck with a larger female and gets beaten up for his troubles. Oof.
  
  Keep Al’s sex in mind for later.
• Despite this L, Al manages to recover from most of his injuries after five months (although one arm is apparently not functioning properly). He’s desperate enough to kill and eat an anurognathid, but of course this isn’t enough. He spots a herd of Dryosaurus, and Branagh tells us that “he has done this hundreds of times before”. It would appear he did learn how to hunt Dryosaurus and killed quite a number all these years.
  
  But not this time. A small log falls in front of Al and he trips over it and falls. He breaks one of his middle toe bones (resulting in that famous swollen infected bone) and limps away. This is such a catastrophic incident that part of “Torosaurus Lock Horns” – the same part that plays when the Liopleurodon bites an Ophthalmosaurus in half – returns here for this scene. At this point you have a strong clue that he’s screwed.
• There’s some brilliance in the writing here IMO, although I don’t know if it’s intentional. Al has helped take down giant Diplodocus, is perceived as a threat by Stegosaurus, and even survived a battle he lost with a larger Allosaurus. It wasn’t any of these giant, immensely powerful beasts that led to Al’s downfall…it was some relatively small, lightning fast beasts – ones that could hardly even put a dent him – that (indirectly) did him in.
  
  The truth is, while small, swift prey like these Dryosaurus can’t fight back nearly as well as a sauropod or a stegosaur, that doesn’t mean they’re easy prey. If you’ve ever watched a video of wolves or greyhounds chasing a rabbit, you’d know how much energy and effort goes into chasing down small, swift prey. And whether or not the predator succeeds is, in truth, all a matter of chance. An Allosaurus may bring down an ill Diplodocus with a group one day, or kill a Stegosaurus the next…but it could also slip and fall and break a foot bone the day after as it tries to ambush some Dryosaurus.
• Al manages to survive for the next two months, but his health has noticeably deteriorated due to his injury that hasn’t healed, and can’t even hunt.
  
  Some time then passes. For the first time since the beginning of this special, we see some Allosaurus hatchlings, which helps to bring this story full circle. They find Al dead in a dried riverbed. And our story pretty much ends.
• It’s true that Al never became fully grown. He was 87% grown when he died and was a subadult (Laws, 1996).
• Now, one thing that I chose to save until the end, which would have serious implications for Big Al if true. A recent SVP abstract reported preliminary results suggesting the presence of medullary bone within the specimen’s limb bones (here's a tweet-> with the full abstract posted). Medullary bone is spongy material that only forms in female birds when they’re going to lay eggs. The apparent presence of it in certain non-avian dinosaur specimens has been used as an indicator of their sex.
  
  If this is really medullary bone that Big Al had (and I should emphasize that there is an alternative hypothesis, and that this is just an abstract for the moment), then this would mean Al was, in fact, female (and at one point was pregnant with her own eggs).

Final verdict:


Image source->

I think if the creators of WWD were going to follow up their fantastic series with models and a soundtrack they already had (while adding a few more things in), there were few things they could have done better than this special. Not only did they respond to old criticisms about the amount of evidence they show, but at the same time they were able to write a very entertaining yet plausible story based on an actual fossil specimen. I feel like one reason it's still so enjoyable to me is that the errors in this special have no significant effects on its overall story/narrative. The biggest errors I could identify had to do with the exact age and size of Al himself (and by extension, other Allosaurus, I suppose), but these hardly big issues as far as the overall premise of the special goes. Of course, the models could be improved upon today, but that’s a general WWD thing.

You could argue that if WWD were to do what basically amounts to an extra episode, it would have been fitting to do it for a time and place completely different from any they had already featured. That would have been a cool idea, and it’s something I kind of wish they did for Walking with Beasts (an episode on Miocene Riversleigh, as they had originally planned, would have been great). However, considering how costly WWD was as is, and the criticisms they got regarding their program being too speculative, I don’t blame them for making their special about an actual fossil of a species they had already featured.

So overall, The Ballad of Big Al rightfully earns its place along with the iconic main Walking with Dinosaurs series, and as a worthy special to it.